The Kingdom of God is Within You

CHAPTER 2

CRITICISMS OF THE DOCTRINE OF
NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL BY FORCE
ON THE PART OF BELIEVERS AND OF UNBELIEVERS

Fate of the Book What I Believe – Evasive Character of Religious Criticisms of Principles of my Book – 1st Reply: Use of Force not Opposed to Christianity – 2d Reply: Use of Force Necessary to Restrain Evil-doers – 3d Reply: Duty of Using Force in Defense of One’s Neighbor – 4th Reply: The Breach of the Command of Non-resistance to be Regarded Simply as a Weakness – 5th Reply: Reply Evaded by Making Believe that the Question has long been Decided – To Devise such Subterfuges and to take Refuge Behind the Authority of the Church, of Antiquity, and of Religion is all that Ecclesiastical Critics can do to get out of the Contradiction between Use of Force and Christianity in Theory and in Practice – General Attitude of the Ecclesiastical World and of the Authorities to Profession of True Christianity – General Character of Russian Free-thinking Critics – Foreign Free-thinking Critics – Mistaken Arguments of these Critics the Result of Misunderstanding the True Meaning of Christ’s Teaching.

The impression I gained of a desire to conceal, to hush up, what I had tried to express in my book, led me to judge the book itself afresh.

On its appearance it had, as I had anticipated, been forbidden, and ought therefore by law to have been burned.  But, at the same time, it was discussed among officials, and circulated in a great number of manuscript and lithograph copies, and in translations printed abroad.

And very quickly after the book, criticisms, both religious and secular in character, made their appearance, and these the government tolerated, and even encouraged.  Consequently, the refutation of a book that no one was supposed to know anything about was even chosen as the subject for theological dissertations in the academies.

The criticisms of my book, Russian and foreign alike, fall under two general divisions – the religious criticisms of men who regard themselves as believers, and secular criticisms, that is, those of free-thinkers.

I will begin with the first class.  In my book I made it an accusation against the teachers of the Church that their teaching is opposed to Christ’s commands clearly and definitely expressed in the Sermon on the Mount, and opposed in especial to his command in regard to resistance to evil, and that in this way they deprive Christ’s teaching of all value.  The Church authorities accept the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount on non-resistance to evil by force as divine revelation; and therefore one would have thought that if they felt called upon to write about my book at all, they would have found it inevitable before everything else to reply to the principal point of my charge against them, and to say plainly, do they or do they not admit the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount and the commandment of non-resistance to evil as binding on a Christian.  And they were bound to answer t…