Page:The Kingdom of God is within you, by Leo Tolstoy.pdf/108

 consistent with their powers," these learned interpreters of Christianity maintain, repeating what was long ago asserted, and could not but be asserted, by those who crucified the Teacher because they did not understand him—the Jews."

It seems that in the judgment of the learned men of our time the Hebrew law—a tooth for a tooth, and an eye for an eye—is a law of just retaliation, known to mankind five thousand years before the law of holiness which Christ taught in its place.

It seems that all that has been done by those men who understood Christ's teaching literally and lived in accordance with such an understanding of it all that has been said and done by all true Christians, by all the Christian saints, all that is now reforming the world the shape of socialism and communism— is simply exaggeration, not worth talking about.

After eighteen hundred years of education in Christianity the civilized world, as represented by its most advanced thinkers, holds the conviction that the Christian religion is religion of dogmas; that its teaching in relation to life is unreasonable, and is an exaggeration, subversive of the real lawful obligations of morality consistent with the nature of man and that very doctrine of retribution which Christ rejected, and in place of which he put his teaching, more practically useful for us.

To learned men the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by force is exaggerated and even irrational. Christianity is much better without it, they think, not observing closely what Christianity, as represented by them, amounts to.

They do not see that to say that the doctrine of non-resistance to evil an exaggeration in Christ's teaching is just like saying that the statement of the equality of the radii of circle is an exaggeration in the definition of circle. And those who speak thus are acting precisely like a man who, having no idea of what a circle is, should declare