complete contradiction to what in reality has taken place and is taking place.
So that, whilst correctly recognising spiritual weapons as the only means of abolishing power, the anarchistic teaching, holding an irreligious materialistic life conception, does not possess this spiritual weapon, and is confined to conjectures and fancies which give the advocates of coercion the possibility of denying its true foundations, owing to the inefficiency of the suggested means of realising this teaching.
This spiritual weapon is simply the one long ago known to men, which has always destroyed power and always given those who used it complete and inalienable freedom. This weapon is but this: a devout understanding of life, according to which man regards his earthly existence as only a fragmentary manifestation of the complete life, connecting his own life with infinite life, and, recognising his highest welfare in the fulfillment of the laws of this infinite life, regards the fulfillment of these laws as more binding upon himself than the fulfillment of any human laws whatsoever.
Only such a religious conception, uniting all men in the same understanding of life, incompatible with subordination to power and participation in it, can truly destroy power.
Only such a life-conception will give men the possibility—without joining in violence—of combining into rational and just forms of life.
Strange to say, only after men have been brought by life itself to the conviction that existing power is invincible, and in our time cannot be overthrown by force, have they come to understand that ridiculously self-evident truth that power and all the evil produced by it are but results of bad life in men, and that therefore, for the abolition of power and the evil it produces, good life on the part of men is necessary.
Men are beginning to understand this. And now they have further to understand that there is only one means for a good life amongst men: the profession and realisation of a religious teaching natural and comprehensible to the majority of mankind.
Only by means of professing and realising such a religious
