Thus it went on everywhere. The recognition that love represents the
highest morality was nowhere denied or contradicted, but this truth was
so interwoven everywhere with all kinds of falsehoods which distorted
it, that finally nothing of it remained but words. It was taught that
this highest morality was only applicable to private life--for home
use, as it were--but that in 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.