Page:Tolstoy - A Great Iniquity.djvu/31

Rh and happy, favourite and reasonable agricultural life for that improved factory life which they have invented for them.

The Russian people—owing to their agricultural environment, their love for this form of life, their Christian trend of character, owing to the circumstance that they, almost alone of all European nations, continue to be an agricultural nation and desire to remain such—are, as it were, providentially placed by historic conditions for the solution of what is called the labour question, in such a position as to stand in the front of the true progressive movement of all mankind. Yet this Russian people are invited by its fancied representatives and leaders to follow in the wake of the dying-out and entangled European and American nations, to become depraved, and to relinquish its own calling as quickly as possible in order to become like Europeans in general.

Astounding is the poverty of thought of these men, who do not think with their own minds, but only servilely repeat whatever is given forth by their European models; but still more astounding is the hardness of their hearts, their cruelty.

“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which outwardly appear beautiful, but inwardly are full of dead men's bones and of all uncleanness. Even so ye also outwardly appear righteous unto men, but inwardly ye are full of hypocrisy and iniquity” (Matt, xxiii. 27, 28).

There was a time when in the name of God and of true faith in Him, men were destroyed, tortured, executed, beaten in scores and hundreds of thousands. We, from the height of our attainments,