Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/199

Rh Christian sensibility of heart finds a whole series of actions become impossible for him. For instance, a Christian who is obliged to take part in judicial proceedings in which a man may be sentenced to death, or who is obliged to take part in elections or in debating a proposal leading to war, or to participate in preparations for war (not to mention war itself), is in a position parallel to that of a kindly man called on to torture or to kill a baby. It is not reason alone that forbids him to do what is demanded of him; he feels instinctively that he cannot do it. For certain actions are morally impossible, just as others are physically impossible. As a man cannot lift a mountain, and as a kindly man cannot kill an infant, so a man living a Christian life cannot take part in deeds of violence. Of what value to him, then, are arguments about the imaginary advantages of doing what it is morally impossible for him to do?

But how is a man to act when he sees clearly the evil of following the law of love and its corollary law of Non-Resistance? How (to use the stock example) is a man to act when he sees a robber killing or outraging a child, and he can only save the child by killing the robber?

When such a case is put, it is generally assumed that the only possible reply is that one should kill the robber to save the child. But this answer is given so quickly and decidedly only because we are all so accustomed to the use of violence—not only to save a child, but even to prevent a neighbouring Government altering its frontier at the expense of ours, or someone from smuggling lace across that frontier, or even to defend our garden fruit from a passer-by.

It is assumed that to save the child the robber should be killed. But it is only necessary to consider the question, on what grounds a man (whether he be or be not a Christian) ought to act so, in order to come to the conclusion that such action has no reasonable foundation, and only seems to us necessary because up to two thousand years ago such conduct was considered rights