The human soul is Christian by nature. Christianity is always perceived by people as something forgotten and suddenly remembered… Christianity raises man to a height revealing a world of happiness, governed by the law of reason. The feeling on discovering the truth of Christianity is similar to that experienced by a man who has been locked in a dark, stuffy tower and then climbs to the highest platform on the battlements, from where he can see a beautiful world he has never seen before.

The realization of submitting to human law is enslaving; the realization of submitting to God’s law is liberating.

One of the certain conditions of man’s undertaking is the fact that the further away the goal of our strivings, and the less we desire to see the fruits of our labor ourselves, the greater and wider the extent of our success will be. (John Ruskin)

The most important and necessary work both for the man performing it and for others is that of which he will not see the results.

‘This may all be so, but in order for men to free themselves from the way of life founded on violence, in which they are entangled and trapped, it is necessary for all men to be religious: that is, prepared for the sake of fulfilling God’s law to sacrifice their bodily and personal welfare; and to live for the present, not for the future, striving for the present only to fulfill the will of God, revealed to them through love. But the people of our world are not religious, and therefore cannot live in this way.’

This is what people are saying today, as if suggesting that religious consciousness, or faith, is a condition unnatural to man, as if it is something exceptional that must be taught and instilled in him. But this is only said by people who, as a result of a particular condition of the Christian world, are temporarily lacking in the most essential and natural condition of human life: faith.

Such an objection is similar to that made by a person who objects to the necessity of work as a necessary condition of human welfare by saying that in order to work one must have the strength to do it. But what about those who are so unaccustomed to work that they cannot, do not know how to, or do not have the physical strength to do it?

Just as work is not something artificial, contrived and ordained by man, but is something unavoidable, without which man cannot live, the same is true of faith, that is to say the awareness of one’s relationship to the Infinite, and the guidance for conduct that results from it. This kind of faith is not something artificial and exceptional that is taught, but on the contrary, it is the most natural feature of human nature, without which man, like a bird without wings, has never, and could never, live.

If we today, in our Christian world, see people lacking in religious awareness (or more strictly speaking, not lacking, but with an obscured religious awareness), this unnatural, abnormal situation is but a temporary and fortuitous condition of the few, and results from those particular circumstances in which the people of the Christian world have lived, and are living, and is just as exceptional as the position of those who live, and are able to live, without working.

And in order for people who have lost this feeling, so inherent and essential to life, to experience it anew, they do not need to invent or establish anything, but need only to eliminate that lie which has temporarily concealed and obscured this feeling from them.

If the men of our world could only be free of the deceit of the Church doctrine, which distorts the Christian teaching, and from the justification and exaltation of a political structure based on this doctrine, which is incompatible with Christianity, then, not only for all Christians, but for all the world, the chief obstacle to religious awareness of the supreme law of love, permitting no exception and no violence, which was revealed to humanity 1900 years ago, and which now alone satisfies the demands of the human conscience, will disappear from men’s souls of its own accord.

And when this law penetrates consciousness as the SUPREME law of life it will, of its own accord, bring an end to that attitude, so harmful to morality, whereby the most extraordinary injustices and cruelties people perform on one another are regarded as natural, inherently human behavior. And that which is dreamed of, desired and promised by the Socialist and Communist regimes of future societies will come to pass, and more besides. And this will be achieved by quite different means; it will be achieved precisely because it will not be sought through the contradictory means of violence, which both the government and its opponents employ in order to achieve it. Freedom from the evil which torments and corrupts men will be attained, not by strengthening and preserving the existing regimes, monarchies, republics or whatever, nor by suppressing the existing order and instituting better Socialist or Communist ones; indeed not in any instance by a few people inventing a particular social system they consider an improvement and imposing it on others by violence. It will be attained only when each one of us (the majority of people), without thinking or worrying about the consequences to ourselves or others, conduct our lives in a particular way, not for the sake of some social organization, but simply for the sake of fulfilling, for one’s own self and one’s own life, the supreme law of life: the law of love that does not permit violence under any circumstances.

(Source: Translated from Russian by EarthlyFireFlies and Wikisource.)