Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/349

Rh an animal life based on violence makes emancipation from hypnotism and an adoption of true religion more and more impossible. And, therefore, men do not do what is natural, possible and necessary in our times: do not destroy the deception and simulacrum of religion, and do not assimilate and preach the true religion.

Is any issue from this enchanted circle possible, and if so, what is it?

At first it seems as if the Governments, which have taken on themselves the duty of guiding the life of the people for their benefit, should lead us out of this circle. That is what men who have tried to alter the arrangements of life founded on violence, and to replace them by a reasonable arrangement based on mutual service and love, have always supposed. So thought the Christian reformers, and the founders of various theories of European Communism, and so also thought the celebrated Chinese reformer Mo Tî, who for the welfare of the people proposed to the Government not to teach school-children military sciences and exercises, and not to give rewards to adults for military achievements, but to teach children and adults the rules of esteem and love, and give rewards and encouragement for feats of love. So also thought, and think, many religious peasant-reformers, of whom I have known and now know several, beginning with Soutáyef and ending with an old man who has now five times presented a petition to the Emperor, asking him to decree the abrogation of false religion, and to order that true Christianity be preached.

It seems to men natural that the Government—which justifies its existence on the score of its care for the welfare of the people—must, to secure that welfare, wish to use the only means which can never do people