The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Leo Tolstoy [reading cloud ebooks .TXT] 📗

to be in love and truth; but there are no external signs by which it would be possible to count oneself or another in with this holy assembly, or to exclude oneself from it, as no external institution can correspond to this concept. —⁠Tolstoy ↩

“Who are those who are outside of the church? Infidels, heretics, schismatics.” —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

“The true Church will be known by the Word of God being studied clear and unmixed with man’s additions and by the sacraments being maintained faithfully to Christ’s teaching.” —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

“Where Christ is, there is the church.” —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

“It is controversial, I know, the right to categorize as such⁠ ⁠…” —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

“… the tendencies which were so actively opposed by the early Fathers. The very designation of heresy seems an attack on liberty of conscience and of thought. We cannot share these scruples, for it would not amount to anything but to deprive Christianity of all distinctive character.” —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

“The Church is a free association; there is much to be gained by separation from it. Conflict with error has no weapons other than thought and feeling. One uniform type of doctrine has not yet been elaborated; secondary divergencies arise in East and West with complete freedom; theology is not tied to invariable formulas. If in the midst of this diversity appears a mass of beliefs common to all, is one not right to see in it, not a formulated system, framed by the representatives of scholastic authority, but faith itself in its surest instinct and its most spontaneous manifestation? If the same unanimity which is revealed in essential points of belief is found also in rejecting certain tendencies, are we not right to conclude that these tendencies were in flagrant opposition to the fundamental principles of Christianity? And will not this presumption be transformed into certainty if we recognize in the doctrine universally rejected by the church the characteristic traits of one of the religions of the past? To say that gnosticism or ebionitism are legitimate forms of Christian thought, one must boldly deny the existence of Christian thought at all, or any specific character by which it could be recognized. It pretends to be a big tent, but it collapses. No one in the time of Plato would have dared to give his name to a doctrine in which the theory of forms had no place, and one would deservedly have excited the just mockery of Greece in trying to represent Epicurus or Zeno as a disciple of the Academy. Let us recognize, then, that if a religion and a doctrine exists which is called Christianity, it may have its heresies.” —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

Impartial History of Church and Heresy. —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

The unity of this life-conception is not impaired by the fact that so many various forms of life, as that of the tribe, the family, the race, the state, and even the life of humanity, according to the theoretical speculations of the positivists, are based on this social, or pagan, life-conception. All these various forms of life are based on the same concept that the life of the personality is not a sufficient aim of life and that the meaning of life can be found only in the aggregate of personalities. —⁠Tolstoy ↩

Here, for example, is a characteristic judgment of the kind in an article of an American periodical, Arena, October, 1890. The article is entitled “A New Basis of Church Life.” In discussing the significance of the Sermon on the Mount, and especially its nonresistance to evil, the author, who is not obliged, like the ecclesiastic writers, to conceal its meaning, says Christ actually preached complete communism and anarchy; but we must know how to look upon Christ in His historical and psychological significance. “Devout common sense must gradually come to look upon Christ as a philanthropic teacher who, like every enthusiast who ever taught, went to an Utopian extreme of his own philosophy. Every great agitation for the betterment of the world has been led by men, who beheld their own mission with such absorbing intensity, that they could see little else. It is no reproach to Christ to say that he had the typical reformer’s temperament; that his precepts cannot be literally accepted, as a complete philosophy of life; and that men are to analyze them, reverently, but, at the same time, in the spirit of ordinary, truth-seeking criticism,” and so forth. Christ would have liked to speak well, but He did not know how to express Himself as precisely and clearly as we, in the spirit of criticism, and so we will correct him. Everything He said about meekness, sacrifice, poverty, the thoughtlessness for the morrow, He said by chance, having been unable to express himself scientifically. —⁠Tolstoy ↩

Not Charles Butt, but Henry Richard. —⁠Weiner ↩

Words from Victor Hugo’s novel, Notre Dame, in regard to printing, which will kill architecture. —⁠Tolstoy ↩

“Let’s enter the Palace of War.” —⁠S.E. Editor ↩

The fact that in America there exist abuses of power, in spite of the small number of troops, not only does not contradict, but even supports this proposition. In America there is a smaller army than in other countries, and so there is nowhere a lesser oppression of the oppressed classes, and nowhere can we foresee so soon the abolition of the abuses of power and of the power itself. But in America itself there have of late, in proportion as the laboring classes become more unified, been heard voices asking more and more frequently for an increase of the army, although America is not threatened by any external attack. The higher