“I believe in this:  I believe in God, whom I understand as Spirit, as Love, as the Source of all.  I believe that he is in me, and I in him.  I believe that the will of God is most clearly and intelligibly expressed in the teaching of the man Jesus, whom to consider as God, and pray to I esteem the greatest blasphemy.  I believe that man’s true welfare lies in fulfilling God’s will, and his will is that men should love one another, and should consequently do to others as they wish others to do to them—­of which it is said in the Gospels that this is the law and the prophets.”

The world has listened to rebels against Church and State before, and still it goes shuffling along as best it can under external laws and governments, seeking from symbols, rituals, and miraculous manifestation such spiritual consolation as it may imbibe.  To such rebels the world, after burning, hanging, and quartering them for several centuries, has now become fairly well accustomed, though it still shoots or hangs them now and then as a matter of habit.  But Tolstoy’s rebellion did not stop at Church and State.  He rebelled against all the ordinary proposals and ideals of rebels themselves, and to him there was not very much to choose between the Socialism of Marxists and the despotism of Tsars.  Liberals, Radicals, Social Democrats, Social Revolutionists, and all the rest of the reforming or rebellious parties—­what were they doing but struggling to re-establish external laws, external governments, officials, and authorities under different forms and different names?  In the Liberal movements of the day he took no part, and he had little influence upon the course of revolution.  He formed no party; no band of rebels followed the orders of the rebel-in-chief; among all the groups of the first Duma there was no Tolstoyan group, nor could there have been any.  When we touch government, he would say, we touch the devil, and it is only by admitting compromise or corruption that men seek to maintain or readjust the power of officials over body and soul.  “It seems to me,” he wrote to the Russian Liberals in 1896,

“It seems to me now specially important to do what is right quietly and persistently, not only without asking permission from Government, but consciously avoiding participation in it....  What can a Government do with a man who will not publicly lie with uplifted hand, or will not send his children to a school he thinks bad, or will not learn to kill people, or will not take part in idolatry, or in coronations, deputations, and addresses, or who says and writes what he thinks and feels?...  It is only necessary for all these good, enlightened, and honest people whose strength is now wasted in Revolutionary, Socialistic, or Liberal activity (harmful to themselves and to their cause) to begin to act thus, and a nucleus of honest, enlightened, and moral people would form around them, united in the same thoughts and the same feelings.  Public