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Christ, by which to fight the powers of darkness and oppression.
Several “Christian communities” have been established in
different parts of Russia in order to put his principles into
practice, and have thriven until they have been broken up by
the police, or through the intrigues of enemies. A large
number of his peaceful followers are now in exile either in
Trans-Caucasia or Siberia, while others have “gone to the
people,” to share their life and toil in order to serve them and
make their life richer and nobler.
In England itself there is a powerful testimony to his
influence in the large sale of his books, and the eagerness with
which the articles from his pen that have recently appeared
in the newspapers have been read; at the universities his books
are well knowm, and thoughtful working men are familiar with
his ideas. Much of his philosophy may be rejected, many of
his results may be held to have come to him solely through the
abnormal conditions of the Russian society in which he has had
his origin and passed the greater part of his life. The present
writers, in admiring the man, by no means accept all his ideas.
But as a living force, as a man who thinks for himself and sets
other people thinking too, it is difficult to compare him with
any other figure of modern times.
Tolstoi’s critics are many and of varied hue; from the priests
who frighten the peasants with stories of his branding all the
mushiks who come to him for counsel and aid with the seal of
the devil on their hands and foreheads, and the bishops who
preach against him as Antichrist personified; to the officials
and politicians who represent him as a dangerous revolutionary,
seeking to rouse the people to armed revolt; and the gossips
who circulate stories about his professing to be a vegetarian,
while rising in the night to eat his beefsteak. A certain
Russian professor, for example, has written a long series of
articles in a Russian review, called the “Ruskaja Mysl,”
trying to explain Tolstoi’s “peculiarities” from “his
inherited desire to live in the open air”; hence, all his work
among the people, his relief work, e.g., among the starving
millions during the great famine, is only “a kind of sport.”
We do not speak of thoughtful men who conscientiously
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