the mother is experiencing, not the joy of love, but the torments of hate? And I think that the evil is in both. One man cannot do anything evil. Evil is the discord of men, and therefore, if I wish to act, I can only do so with the aim of putting an end to the discord, and bringing about concord between the mother and child.
How must I act? Constrain the mother? I do not destroy her discord─the sin─with her child, but I only induce a new sin, a discord between her and myself. What is possible? One thing─to put myself in the child's place. This will not be unreasonable.
What Dostoyevsky wrote, and is very repugnant to me, is said to me by ascetic monks and metropolitans, to wit, that it is possible to wage wars, that this is self-defense to offer your life for your brethren; and I have always replied, to defend them by your own breast, offering yourself, is right, but to shoot people with guns is not self-defense, but murder. Investigate the teaching of the Gospels, and you will see that the third brief commandment,[1] not to resist evil, that is, not to return evil for evil, is, I will not say the chief, but is the keystone of the whole teaching, and the very thing which all pseudo-Christian commentaries have strenuously avoided and still avoid, and is the very position, the denial of which serves as the foundation of all that you so righteously hate.
I am not speaking of the council of Nicæa, which accomplished so much evil, and was based on this very same understanding of Christ's teaching, that is, on violence in the name of right and of Christ; in the apostolic times, in Paul, in the Acts, this idea of violence in the name of right is begotten, and destroys the meaning of the doctrine.
How often it has happened ludicrously to me in my conversations with popes and revolutionists, who regarded the evangelical teaching as a weapon for the attainment of external objects, that men of these two classes standing
- ↑ You have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; but I say unto you, Resist not evil; but whoever smites you on the right cheek turn to him the other also.─Matthew x. 38, 39.
