Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/25

 Rh perception of human unity that men will feel it impossible to take advantage of the need, the hunger, and the cold of others to exploit them; and when men, acknowledging the law of bread-labour as binding on everyone, will recognise it as their bounden duty, without selling articles of prime necessity, to feed, clothe, and warm one another in case of need.

Approaching the matter from another side, I look at this problem of Bóndaref's thus: We often hear reflections on the insufficiency of merely negative laws or commandments—i.e., of rules telling us what not to do. People say. We need positive laws or commandments—rules telling us what to do. The five commandments of Christ—(1) to consider no one insignificant or insane, and to be angry with no one; (2) not to consider sexual intercourse as a matter of pleasure, nor to leave the wife or husband with whom one has once united; (3) to take no oaths to anyone, and not to give away one's freedom; (4) to endure injuries and violence, and not to resist them by violence; and (5) to consider no man an enemy, but to love enemies as friends—it is said that these five commandments of Christ's all tell only what should not be done, but that there are no commandments or laws telling what should be done.

And, indeed, it may seem strange that in Christ's teaching there are no equally definite commandments telling us what we ought to do. But this seems strange only to those who do not believe Christ's real teaching, which is contained, not in five commandments, but in the teaching of truth itself.

The teaching of truth expressed by Christ is not contained in laws and commandments, but in one thing only—the meaning given to life. And that meaning is, that life and the blessing of life are not to be found in personal happiness, as people generally suppose, but in the service of God and man. And this is not a command which must be obeyed to gain a reward, nor is it a mystical expression of something mysterious and unintelligible, but it is the elucidation of a law of life previously concealed; it is the indication of the fact that