Christians and the Law-Courts

     But perhaps having said this about the judgement on the woman taken in adultery and having put forth parables about the foundations of the house, referring to the general weakness of mankind, he nevertheless does not forbid appeals to human courts of law for the purpose of obtaining protection from evil men. But I saw that this is quite inadmissible.

     In the Sermon on the Mount, addressing everybody, he says: 'And if any man will sue thee at law and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.'^{12 Matthew 5:40} Therefore he forbids anyone to go to law. But perhaps Christ speaks only of each man's personal relation to the courts and does not condemn the process of law itself, but allows people to judge others provided they do so in the institutions established for that purpose? But neither can this be supposed. Christ, in the prayer he gave, bids all men without exception forgive others, that they may be forgiven their own sins. And he repeats the thought often. Therefore every man when he prays and before bringing his gift to the altar should forgive everyone. How can a man, who by the faith he professes must always forgive all men, judge and condemn anyone in the law-courts? It follows that, according to Christ's teaching, there can be no such things as Christian courts which inflict punishment.

     But perhaps the context shows that in this passage Christ, when he says, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged,' was not thinking of human courts of justice? But this again is not so; on the contrary, it is clear from the context that when he said, 'Judge not,' Christ was speaking precisely of the institution of law-courts. In Matthew and Luke, before saying, 'Judge not,' he says: Resist not him that is evil, endure evil, do good to all men. And before that, in Matthew, he repeats the words of the Hebrew criminal code, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.'^{13 Matthew 5:38} And after this reference to the criminal law, he says: But ye shall not do so; resist not him that is evil; and then he adds, 'Judge not.' Therefore Christ speaks precisely of human criminal law, and repudiates it by the words, 'Judge not.'

     Moreover, in Luke, he not only says, 'Judge not,' but 'Judge not . . . and condemn not.'^{14 Luke 6:37 "Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven."} That word 'condemn,' which has so similar a meaning, was not added for nothing. The addition can have had only one aim - to elucidate the sense in which the word 'judge' is used.

     If he had meant to say, do not judge your neighbor, he would have added that word 'neighbor,' but he adds the word which is translated 'do not condemn,' and then adds, 'that ye be not condemned; forgive all men and you will be forgiven.'

     But perhaps, all the same, Christ was not thinking of the law-courts when he said this and I may be attributing my own thought to his words which had a different meaning.

Apostles rejected law-courts

     So I asked myself how Christ's first disciples, the Apostles, regarded man's law-courts. Did they acknowledge them or approve of them?

     In chapter 4:11, the Apostle James says:

     The word translated 'speak evil of' is katalalew. Without referring to the dictionary one can see that this word must mean indict. And so it does, as anyone may convince himself by a reference to the dictionary. It is translated, 'Who speaks evil of his brother, speaks evil of the law.' One involuntarily asks, Why? However much I may speak evil of my brother, I do not speak evil of the law; but if I indict and bring my brother before the court of law, I evidently thereby condemn the law of Christ: that is to say, I consider the law of Christ insufficient and indict and condemn his law. Then it is clear that I do not fulfil his law but constitute myself its judge. The judge, says Christ, is he who can save. But how shall I, who am not able to save, be a judge and inflict punishments?

     The whole passage speaks of human law-courts and repudiates them. The whole of the Epistle is full of that thought. In the Epistle of James 2:1-13, it is said:

The last words have often been translated: 'Mercy is proclaimed in the courts,' and were so translated to imply that there may be Christian courts of law, but that they must be merciful.

     James exhorts the brethren not to make distinctions between people. If you make distinctions, you diekriqhte, are divided in your minds, like the judges with evil intentions in the courts. You have judged the poor to be worse. But on the contrary it is the rich man who is worse. He both oppresses you and drags you before the courts. If you live according to the law of love of your neighbor, according to the law of charity (which, in distinction from the other law, James calls the 'law of the Lord'), you do well. But if you regard persons, and make distinctions between man and man, you are offenders against the law of mercy. And, having probably in mind the example of the woman taken in adultery whom they brought before Christ that she might be stoned, or the sin of adultery in general, James says that he who executes the adulterers will be guilty of murder and will infringe the external law. For the same external law forbids both adultery and murder. He says: 'Behave like men who are judged by the law of liberty. For there is no mercy for him who has no mercy, and therefore mercy destroys the courts.'

     How could that be said more clearly and definitely? All discrimination between people is forbidden, every judgement that this man is good and that man evil directly indicates that the human courts are undoubtedly bad, and proves that the court itself is criminal, as it executes people for offenses and therefore itself infringes God's law of charity.

     I read the Epistles of St. Paul, who himself suffered from the courts, and in the very first chapter of the Epistle to the Romans I found a reprimand which he addresses to the Romans for their various sins and errors, and among the rest for their courts (5:32):

     Chap. 2:1:

     The Apostle Paul says that they, knowing the righteous law of God, themselves do wrong and teach others to do the same, and therefore the man who judges cannot be justified.

     Such is the attitude to the law-courts which I found in the Epistles of the Apostles, and in their lives, as we all know, man's courts appeared an evil and a temptation which had to be endured with firmness, and with submission to the will of God.

Early Christians did not go to law

     By reconstructing in one's imagination the position of the first Christians among the heathen, one can easily understand that the Christians, who were persecuted in man's law-courts, could not prohibit law-courts. Only incidentally could they allude to that evil, condemning its foundations, as they did.

     I consulted the Fathers of the Church of the first centuries, and saw that they always define the difference between their teaching and that of all others by the fact that they never put compulsion on anyone in any way and never went to law with anyone (see Athenagoras and Origen), did not execute, but only endured the torments to which they were condemned by man's courts. All the martyrs, by their deeds, made the same profession. I saw that all the Christians till the time of Constantine regarded the law-courts not otherwise than as an evil which had to be patiently endured, and that the thought could never enter the head of any Christian of those days that Christians could take part in prosecutions. I saw that the words of Christ,' Judge not that ye be not judged,' were understood by his first disciples as I now understand them in their direct meaning: 'Do not prosecute in the courts, and do not participate in them.'

     Everything indubitably confirmed my conviction that the words 'Judge not and condemn not' mean, do not judge in the courts; yet the explanation that it means do not malign your neighbor is so generally accepted, and so boldly and confidently do the courts flourish in all Christian countries, supported even by the Church, that I long doubted the correctness of my interpretation. If everybody could explain the matter in this way and organize Christian courts, then probably they had some ground for so doing and there is something I do not understand, said I to myself. There must be grounds on which the words are understood to mean 'to malign,' and there must be grounds for instituting Christian courts.

     And I examined the explanations of the ecclesiastical theologians. In all these interpretations, from the fifth century onward, I found that the words were taken in the sense of condemnation of one's neighbor, that is, maligning. And as the words are taken only to mean condemning one's neighbor in words, the question arises - how can one refrain from condemning? Evil must be condemned! Therefore all the interpretations revolve round the question, what one may and what one may not condemn. It is said (St. Chrysostom and Theophilus) that for the servants of the Church it must not be understood as a prohibition to judge, for the Apostles themselves judged. It is said that probably Christ referred to the Jews who condemned their neighbors for small sins and themselves committed great ones.

     But nowhere is a word said of the institution of courts of law and of the relation in which the courts stand to this condemnation of judging. Does Christ forbid them or allow them?

     To that particular question no reply is given, as though it were quite obvious that as soon as a Christian occupied a judge's seat, he might not merely condemn his neighbor, but have him executed.

'Evil speaking' is mistranslated

     I consulted the Greek, the Catholic, and the Protestant writers, and the writers of the Tubingen School and of the historical school. All of them, even the most free-thinking, understood those words as a condemnation of evil-speaking. But why, contrary to the whole teaching of Christ, the words are understood so narrowly that the courts are not included in the prohibition of judging; why it is supposed that Christ, forbidding as an evil deed a condemnation of one's neighbor that involuntarily slips from one's tongue, does not consider as evil and does not forbid a similar condemnation uttered deliberately and associated with the infliction of violence on the person condemned, is not explained, nor is there the slightest hint that it is possible for 'condemnation' to mean the judging which takes place in the law-court and from which millions of people suffer. More than that, in dealing with these words, 'Judge not and condemn not,' reference to that most cruel habit of legal condemnation is carefully avoided, and even fenced off. The theologian-interpreters remark that Christian law-courts must exist and do not conflict with the law of Christ.

     Noticing this, I began to doubt the good faith of these interpretations and referred to the translation of the words 'judge' and 'condemn' - the very matter with which I ought to have begun.

     In the original these words are krinw and katadikazw. The incorrect translation of the word katadikazw in the Epistle of James, where it is translated by the words 'speak evil of,' confirmed my suspicion of the incorrectness of the translations.

     I looked how the words krinw and katadikazw are translated in the Gospels in different languages, and I saw that the word which in the Vulgate is translated condemnare, is translated in a similar way in French, while in Slavonic it is 'condemn,' and Luther translates it Verdammen, to curse.

     The contrast of these translations strengthened my doubts, and I asked myself: What does and what can the Greek word krinw, employed in both the Gospels, mean, and also the word katadikazw, used by Luke the Evangelist, who, in the opinion of the experts, wrote rather good Greek? How would a man translate those words who knew nothing of the Gospel teaching and the existing interpretations of it, but had before him merely that saying?

     I consulted the general dictionary and found that the word krinw has many different meanings, and among them very commonly the meaning of sentencing in the law-court, even executing, but that it never has the meaning of evil-speaking. I consulted the New Testament dictionary and found that the word is often used in the New Testament in the sense of to sentence in court. It is sometimes used in the sense of differentiation, but never in the sense of evil-speaking. And so I see that the word krinw may be translated variously, but that a translation which makes it mean 'speak evil' is the most far-fetched and unexpected of all.

     Then I inquired about the word katadikazw coupled to krinw, the word of many meanings - evidently on purpose to define the sense in which the writer was using that word. In the general dictionary I found that the word never has any other meaning than to condemn in court to punishment or execution. I looked in the New Testament dictionary, and found that the word is used in the Epistle of James 5:6, 'Ye have condemned and killed the just'; the word 'condemned' is this same word katadikazw, used in reference to Christ, who was condemned. And in no other way is this word ever used in the whole of the New Testament, or in any Greek dialect.

     What does this all mean? What absurdity have I arrived at? I, and everyone in our society, if we have ever considered the fate of mankind, have been horrified at the sufferings and the evil introduced into man's life by man's criminal law - an evil both for the judged and for those who judge - from the executions of Genghiz Khan to the executions of the French Revolution and those of our day.

     No one with a heart can have escaped an impression of horror and doubt in goodness at even hearing of, not to say seeing, the execution of men by other men: the floggings to death with rods,^{15 A method of punishment frequently practiced in the army under Nicholas I. The sentence was so many thousand strokes, and the prisoner had to run the gauntlet between ranks of soldiers, the result often being death from collapse. - A.M.} the guillotines, and the scaffolds.

     In the Gospels, each word of which we consider holy, it is directly and clearly said: You have had a criminal law - 'An eye for an eye' - but I give you a new law: 'Resist not him that is evil.' Obey this law, all of you: do not inflict evil for evil, but do good always and to all men, forgive all men.

     Further, it is clearly said: 'Do not go to law.' And that doubt about the meaning of the words may be impossible, it is added 'Do not condemn to punishment in the courts.'

     My heart says clearly and distinctly: do not execute. Science says, do not execute; the more you execute the more evil will there be. Reason says, do not execute, evil cannot be cut off by evil. The word of God, in which I believe, says the same. And I, reading the whole teaching and reading the words: 'Judge not that ye be not judged, condemn not that ye be not condemned, forgive and ye shall be forgiven,' admit that this is the word of God, say that it means that I must not go about talking scandal and maligning people, and continue to consider the law-court to be a Christian institution and to consider myself both a judge and a Christian.^{16 Tolstoy was an Arbiter of the Peace for about a year in 1862 after the emancipation of the serfs, his duties being to adjust differences between the landed proprietors and the newly emancipated serfs. - A.M.} And I was horrified at the grossness of the deception in which I was involved.

Misunderstanding of Christ's teaching

     I NOW understand what Christ meant when he uttered the words: 'It was said to you: an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say unto you: resist not him that is evil, but bear with him.'^{17 Matthew 5:38-39} Christ said: It has been instilled into you and you are accustomed to think that it is good and reasonable to resist evil by force and to tear out an eye for an eye, to institute criminal courts, police, an army, and to defend yourselves from foes; but I say, Do not use violence, do not take part in violence, do no harm to anyone, not even to those whom you call 'enemies.'

     I now understand that Christ, in the position he takes up of non-resistance to the evil man, is speaking not only of what will result directly for each man from non-resistance to him that is evil but, in contradiction to the principle under which mankind lived in his time under the law of Moses and under the Roman law, and now lives under various legal codes, he sets up the principle of non-resistance to the evil man, which principle according to his teaching should be the basis of man's social life and should free mankind from an evil they inflict on themselves. He says: 'You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction. For thousands of years you have tried your principle; now try my contrary one.'

     I have recently spoken to people of most divergent opinions about this law of Christ's - non-resistance to the evil man. It did occur, though rarely, that I met some who agreed with me. But, strange to say, two kinds of people never, even in principle, tolerated a straightforward understanding of the law, but always warmly defended the justice of resistance to the evil-doer. These are people who belong to the two extreme poles: patriotic Conservative Christians, who consider their Church to be the only true one, and Revolutionary Atheists. Neither these nor those wish to abandon the right to resist by violence what they consider evil. And the wisest and most learned of them are quite unwilling to see the simple and obvious truth that if one admits that one man may use violence to oppose what he considers evil, another may do the same to resist what he, in turn, considers evil.

     A correspondence lately passed through my hands between an Orthodox Slavophil and a Christian-Revolutionary, which was instructive in this respect. The one advocated the violence of war on behalf of our oppressed brother-Slavs; the other, a revolutionary violence on behalf of our oppressed brethren, the Russian peasants. Both demanded violence, and both relied on the teaching of Christ.

     People in general understand Christ's teaching in very various ways, but not in the direct, simple meaning which inevitably flows from his words.

     We have arranged our whole life on the very foundations he denies. We do not wish to understand his teaching in its simple, direct meaning, and we assure ourselves and others either that we do not acknowledge his teaching or that it is unsuited to us. The so-called believers believe that Christ is God, the Second Person of the Trinity who descended to earth to show us how to live, and they arrange most elaborate ceremonies necessary for the administration of the sacraments, for erecting churches, for sending out missionaries, for ordaining priests, for the direction of their flocks, for amending the creeds, but one little thing they forget - namely, to do what he told us to do. The unbelievers try to arrange their lives in all sorts of ways, only not according to the law of Christ, having decided in advance that that law will not do. But no one wishes to try doing as Christ bids us. Moreover, before even trying to do it, both the believers and the non-believers decide in advance that it is impossible.

     He says simply and clearly: the law of resistance by violence to him that is evil which you have made the basis of your lives, is false and unnatural; and he gives another basis - non-resistance - which in his opinion can alone deliver mankind from evil. He says: You think your laws of violence correct evil; they only increase it. You have tried for thousands of years to destroy evil by evil, but instead of destroying it you have increased it. Do what I do, and you will know whether it is true.

     He not only says this but in his whole life, and by his death, he carries out his teaching of non-resistance to the evil man.

     Believers hear all this, they read it in their churches, they say the words are divine and that he who spoke them was God, but they say: It is all very well, but it is impossible with our arrangement of life - it would upset the whole way of life to which we are accustomed and which we like. Therefore we believe all this only as being an ideal toward which humanity must strive - an ideal to be attained by prayer and by faith in the sacraments and the redemption and in the resurrection from the dead. Others, the unbelievers, the free-thinking investigators of Christ's teaching - Strauss, Renan, and others - who follow the historic method, having thoroughly imbibed the Church's explanation that Christ's teaching has no direct reference to life but is a visionary doctrine consoling to feeble-minded people, say most seriously that Christ's teaching was only fit to be preached to the savage inhabitants of the wilds of Galilee, but that for us, with our culture, it appears merely a sweet dream - 'du charmant docteur,' as Renan says. In their opinion Christ could not rise high enough to understand all the wisdom of our civilization and culture. Had he stood on the height of education on which these learned people stand he would not have talked such charming rubbish about the birds of the air, about turning one's cheek, and about not being troubled for tomorrow. These learned historians judge of Christianity by the Christianity they see in our society. The Christianity of our society and day regards our present life as true and sacred, with its organizations, prisons, solitary confinements, Ciros,^{18 The translator finds himself in a difficulty when he has to devise an equivalent for the most improper type of Moscow restaurant.} factories, newspapers, brothels, and parliaments, and from the teaching of Christ it selects only what does not infringe that life. But as Christ's teaching is the negation of all that life, nothing is accepted of it except mere words. The learned historians see this, and, as they are under no necessity to hide it as it is hidden by the pseudo-believers, this version of Christ's teaching deprived of all substance is subjected to profound criticism and very rightly repudiated. The deduction is clear that there never was anything in Christianity except dreamy ideals.

     It would seem as though before judging Christ's teaching one should understand what it consists of, and to decide whether his teaching is reasonable or not one should first of all admit that he said what he said; but that is just what is not done either by the Church or by the free-thinking expositors. And we know very well why they do not do it.

     We know very well that Christ's teaching always included and includes the denial of all those human illusions, those 'vain things,' empty idols, which we, by calling them Church, State, culture, science, art, and civilization, think we can separate from the ranks of delusions. But it is just against them that Christ speaks, without excluding any 'empty idols.'

     Not Christ only, but all the Hebrew prophets, John the Baptist, and all the world's true sages, have spoken of that same State, culture, and civilization, as an evil, ruinous to mankind.

     Suppose a builder says to a man, 'Your house is bad, it must be entirely rebuilt,' and then gives details as to what beams should be cut, and how it should be done and where they should be placed. The man does not listen to the words about the house being bad and being rebuilt, but with a pretense of respect listens to the builder's further instructions and arrangements in the house. Obviously all the advice given by the builder will appear inapplicable, and any disrespectful person will say plainly that his advice is stupid. This is what happens with regard to Christ's teaching.

     Not finding a better comparison, I made use of the above. And then I remembered that Christ when preaching his doctrine used that same comparison. He said: I will destroy your temple and in three days will build a new one. For that he was crucified; and it is for that very thing that his teaching is now crucified.

     The least one can demand of people who judge any doctrine is that they should judge of it in the sense in which the teacher himself understood it. And he understood his teaching not as a distant ideal for humanity, obedience to which is impossible, nor as a mystical poetic fantasy wherewith he captivated the simple-minded inhabitants of Galilee. He understood his teaching as a real thing, and a thing which would save mankind. And he did not dream on the cross but died for his teaching, and many others are dying and will yet die. Of such a teaching one cannot say that it is a dream!

     Every true doctrine is a dream to those in error. We have come to this, that there are many people (of whom I was one) who say that this teaching is visionary because it is not natural to man. It is not in accord, they say, with man's nature to turn the other cheek when one cheek is struck; it is not natural to give what is one's own to another; it is unnatural to work for others instead of for oneself. It is natural to man, they say, to defend his safety and the safety of his family and his property: in other words, it is natural for man to struggle for his own existence. The learned jurists prove scientifically that man's most sacred duty is to defend his rights, that is - to struggle.

Worldly organizations unnatural to man

     It is sufficient to free oneself for a moment from the thought that the order which exists and has been arranged by men is the best and is sacrosanct, for the objection that Christ's teaching is not accordant with man's nature to turn against the objector. Who will deny that to murder or torture, I will not say a man, but to torture a dog or kill a hen or calf is contrary and distressing to man's nature? (I know people who live by tilling the land, and who have given up eating meat merely because they had themselves to kill their own animals.) Yet the whole structure of our lives is such that each man's personal advantage is obtained by inflicting suffering on others, which is contrary to human nature. The whole order of our life and the whole complex mechanism of our institutions designed for the infliction of violence, witness to the extent to which violence is contrary to human nature. Not a single judge would decide to strangle with a rope the man he condemns to death from the bench. Not a single magistrate would make up his mind himself to take a peasant from his weeping family and shut him up in prison. None of our generals or soldiers, were it not for discipline, oaths of allegiance, and declarations of war, would, I will not say kill hundreds of Turks and Germans and destroy their villages, but would even decide to wound a single man. All this is only done thanks to a very complex state and social machinery the purpose of which is so to distribute the responsibility for the evil deeds that are done that no one should feel the unnaturalness of those deeds. Some men write the laws; others apply them; a third set drill men and habituate them to discipline, that is to say, to senseless and implicit obedience; a fourth set - the people who are disciplined - commit all sorts of deeds of violence, even killing people, without knowing why or wherefore. But a man need only, even for a moment, free himself mentally from this net of worldly organization in which he is involved to understand what is really unnatural to him.

     As soon as we cease to affirm that the customary evil we employ is an immutable divine truth, it becomes obvious which of the two is natural and accordant to man: violence, or the law of Christ. Is it to know that my tranquility and safety and that of my family, and all my pleasures, are purchased by the destitution, corruption, and misery of millions, by hangings every year, by hundreds of thousands of suffering prisoners, by millions torn from their homes and stupefied by discipline - soldiers, policemen, and gendarmes who, armed with pistols against hungry people, safeguard my amusements - to purchase every sweet morsel I put into my mouth or into the mouths of my children, by the sufferings of humanity that are unavoidable for the procuring of these morsels? Or to know that, be the morsel what it may, it is mine only when no one else needs it and when no one has to suffer on account of it?

     It is only necessary once to understand that this is so, and that every pleasure of mine, every moment of tranquility under our organization of life, is purchased by the deprivations and sufferings of thousands who are restrained by violence; one need but once understand that fact, to understand what is natural to man's entire nature - that is to say, not merely to his animal nature, but to his reasonable nature as well. One need only understand the law of Christ in its full meaning, with all its consequences, in order to understand that Christ's teaching is not contrary to man's nature, but that it really consists in rejecting what is contrary to man's nature, namely, the visionary human doctrine of resistance to evil which now makes life unhappy.

     Christ's doctrine of non-resistance to him that is evil is a dream! But that the life of men in whose souls pity and love for one another is implanted, has been passed, and is now being passed, by some in organizing executions at the stake, knouts,^{19 A leather whip formerly used in Russia for floggings. - P.R.} and breakings on the wheel, lashes, the splitting of nostrils, tortures, handcuffs, penal servitude, gallows, shootings, solitary confinements, prisons for women and children, in arranging the slaughter of tens of thousands in wars, in organizing periodic revolutions and Pugachev^{20 Pugachev was the Cossack leader of a very serious peasant revolt in the time of Catherine II. - A.M.} revolts, and the life of others in carrying out all these horrors, and the life of a third set in evading these sufferings and avenging themselves for them - is this not a dreadful dream?

     One has but to understand Christ's teaching to understand that the world, not that which God gave for man's delight but the world men have devised for their own destruction, is a dream, and a very wild and terrible dream - the raving of a maniac from which one need but awake in order never to return to that terrible nightmare.

     God descended to earth; the Son of God - one of the Persons of the Trinity - became flesh and redeemed Adam's sin; this God, we were taught to think, must have said something secret, mystical, difficult to understand, and only to be understood by the aid of faith and the sacraments; and suddenly it appears that the word of God is so simple, so clear, so reasonable. God says simply: Do not do evil to one another - and there will be no evil. Is it possible that God's revelation is so simple? Can it be that God only said that? It seems to us that we all knew that: it is so simple.

     Elijah the prophet, fleeing from men, hid in a cave, and it was revealed to him that God would appear to him at the entrance to the cave. A storm arose that broke the trees. Elijah thought this was God, and looked; but God was not there. Then came thunder; the thunder and lightning were terrible. Elijah went out to look whether God was not there; but God was not there either. Then there came an earthquake; fire arose from the earth, the rocks were rent, and the mountains quaked. Elijah looked, but God was still not there. Then a light, quiet breeze arose, bringing the refreshing scent of the fields. Elijah looked - and God was there!^{21 I Kings 19:9-13} Such, too, are these simple words of God: 'Resist not him that is evil.'

     They are very simple, but in them is expressed the law of God and man, one and eternal. The law is to such an extent eternal that if there is in history a movement forward toward the elimination of evil, it is thanks only to those men who have so understood Christ's teaching and have endured evil and not resisted it by violence. Progress toward the welfare of mankind is made not by the persecutors but by the persecuted. As fire does not extinguish fire, so evil cannot extinguish evil. Only goodness, meeting evil and not infected by it, conquers evil. That this is so is in man's spiritual world an immutable law comparable to the law of Galileo, but even more immutable, clearer and more complete. People may deviate from it and hide it from others, but nevertheless the progress of humanity toward what is good can only be accomplished by that path. Every step forward is made solely in the path of non-resistance to evil. And in the face of all possible temptations and threats the disciples of Christ may, with more assurance than Galileo, declare: 'And yet, not by violence, but by goodness alone can you destroy evil.' If that advance is slow, this is thanks solely to the fact that the clearness, simplicity, reasonableness, inevitability, and necessity of Christ's teaching is hidden from the majority of men in the most cunning and dangerous way, hidden under a different doctrine falsely called his.