public life all forms of violence--such as imprisonment,
executions, and wars--might be used for the protection of the
majority against a minority of evildoers, though such means were
diametrically opposed to any vestige of love. And though common
sense indicated that if some men claim to decide who is to be
subjected to violence of all kinds for the benefit of others,
these men to whom violence is applied may, in turn, arrive at a
similar conclusion with regard to those who have employed
violence to them, and though the great religious teachers of
Brahmanism, Buddhism, and above all of Christianity, foreseeing
such a perversion of the law of love, have constantly drawn
attention to the one invariable condition of love (namely, the
enduring of injuries, insults, and violence of all kinds without
resisting evil by evil) people continued--regardless of all that
leads man forward--to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue
of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of
evil by violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner
contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who
recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an
order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to
torture but even to kill one another.
For a long time people lived in this obvious contradiction
without noticing it. But a time arrived when this contradiction
became more and more evident to thinkers of various nations. And
the old and simple truth that it is natural for men to help and
to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another,
became ever clearer, so that fewer and fewer people were able to
believe the sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had
been made so plausible.
In former times the chief method of justifying the use of
violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a
divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs,
and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the
weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God--given right of the
ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost
simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman world, as well as
in Buddhist and Confucian spheres, and in recent times it has so
faded away as to prevail no longer against man's reasonable
understanding and the true religious feeling. People saw more
and more clearly, and now the majority see quite clearly, the
senselessness and immorality of subordinating their wills to
those of other people just like themselves, when they are bidden
to do what is contrary not only to their interests but also to
their moral sense. And so one might suppose that having lost
confidence in any religious authority for a belief in the
divinity of potentates of various kinds, people would try to free
themselves from subjection to it. But unfortunately not only
were the rulers, who were considered supernatural beings,
benefited by having the peoples in subjection, but as a result of
the belief in, and during the rule of, these pseudodivine beings,
ever larger and larger circles of people grouped and established
themselves around them, and under an appearance of governing took
advantage of the people. And when the old deception of a
supernatural and God-appointed authority had dwindled away these
men were only concerned to devise a new one which like its
predecessor should make it possible to hold the people in bondage
to a limited number of rulers.