‘When you can say in all truth and with your whole heart: “My Lord, my God, do with me as you will”, only then will you free yourself from slavery and become completely free.

A free man is only master of what he can master without impediment. And the only thing we are entirely free to master without impediment is ourselves. Therefore, if you see a person wishing to control not himself but others, you know that he is not free: he has become a slave of his desire to dominate people.’ (Epictetus)

But what can the hundreds, thousands, let us say hundreds of thousands of insignificant, powerless, isolated people do against the vast number of men who are bound to the State and equipped with all the powerful weapons of violence? The struggle seems not only unequal but impossible, and yet the outcome of this struggle is as little in doubt as the outcome between the struggle between the darkness of night and the light of dawn.

One of those young men imprisoned for refusing military service wrote the following:

‘Sometimes I get the chance of talking to the soldiers from the guardroom and I always smile sincerely when they say to me: “Hey lad, it’s no good spending the whole of your youth in prison.”

“It’s all right. Isn’t the end the same for everyone?” I reply to them.

“Well that may be so, but it wouldn’t be so bad if you’d serve in the regiment.”

“But my life here is more peaceful than yours in the regiment,” I say.

“So it may be. But it’s no good for you. You’ve spent four years here and if you’d been in the army you’d have been home long ago. Goodness knows when you’ll go free now,” they say ironically, laughing at me.

“Well suppose I’m all right here,” I say. They shake their heads and give it some thought. “It’s odd.”

‘The same kind of conversation goes on between myself and my cellmates, who are soldiers. One Jewish soldier says to me: “It’s astonishing. You put up with so much yet you’re always cheerful and alert.”

‘And when any one of my cellmates starts feeling dispirited and depressed the others say to him: “Look at you. Before you’ve had time to sit down you start pining. Look at the old dad here (as they call me on account of my little beard), look how long he’s been here and he still keeps cheerful!”

‘And thus, bit by bit the conversation builds up between us. We chatter away about nothing, or sometimes about serious matters, God, life, or whatever interests us. Or else one of us talks about his life in the country and then how good I feel, just listening. On the whole I really don’t do too badly here.’

This is what another writes:

‘I could not say that my inner life is always the same; there are moments of exhaustion and moments of joy.

‘At the moment I am feeling fine, but it still takes a lot of courage to look triumphantly at all the things that constantly happen in prison life. You try to penetrate to the depths of things and to persuade yourself that all this is but a moment in time, and you have been given more strength than is needed in the situation, and then joy lights up your heart again and you forget about everything that has happened. Thus life continues in this inner struggle.’

And a third writes:

‘I was tried on 28 March and sentenced to five years, five months and six days in prison. You would not believe how relieved and cheerful I felt after the trial: it was like the relief one feels after a heavy burden has been removed. I felt so lighthearted and bold after the trial, I wish I could feel as good forever!’

On the other hand the spiritual state of those who employ violence, submit to it, and participate in it is completely different. Instead of experiencing the natural and inherent feeling of love for their fellow men, all these millions of people carry only feelings of hatred, blame and fear towards all humanity, with the exception of the small circle of like-minded people to which they belong. They suppress all their human feelings to such an extent that murdering fellow men seems to them to be a necessary condition of well-being in life.

‘You talk of the cruelty of executions, but what else can we do with the scoundrels,’ say conservative-minded people today in Russia. ‘In France things only calmed down after they had cut off goodness knows how many heads. Let them stop making and throwing bombs and we will stop hanging them.’

With the same inhuman cruelty the revolutionary leaders demand and desire the death of the government, and the revolutionary workers and peasants demand the death of the capitalists and landowners.

These people know that they are not behaving as men should behave, they are afraid, and tell lies and try to bring evil upon themselves in order not to see the truth. They stifle the truth that exists within them and which appeals to them, and they suffer, unceasingly, from the most cruel of all torments: the sufferings of the soul.

Some know that they are doing something that is natural to all people, which constitutes the aim towards which humanity is moving and which inevitably results in good, both for the individual and for the collectivity. Others, as much as they try to hide it from themselves, know that what they are doing is unnatural to man and against human nature, and is something from which humanity is continually withdrawing. They know that what they do creates suffering for the individual, for the collectivity and most of all for the person who is doing it. On the one hand is awareness of lack of freedom, fear and reticence; on the other freedom, peace and honesty. On the one hand, lack of faith, on the other, faith; on the one hand lies, on the other the truth; on the one hand hatred, on the other, love; on the one hand the age-old torments of the past, on the other the incipient joys of the future. Thus what doubt can there be as to which side victory belongs to?

The irresistible truth was stated by the now deceased French writer when he wrote this wonderfully inspired letter: ‘Spiritual force has never engaged man, has never exerted so much influence over him, as today. It has, so to speak, filled the air the world breathes. Those few individual spirits who lived in isolation and wished for social regeneration have sought it bit by bit; they have sought one another out, beckoned to each other, approached one another, united, understood one another and formed a group, a center of attraction towards which other souls now fly from the four corners of the earth, just as larks fly towards a mirror. Thus they have formed a general collective soul in order that the men of the future may jointly realize, consciously and irresistibly, the impending union and steady progress of nations that were recently enemies of each other. I find and recognize this new spirit in phenomena which seem most likely to refute it.

‘The arming of all nations, the threats made between government leaders, the reemergence of racism, the enmity between fellow countrymen, and even the puerility of the events at the Sorbonne are really phenomena that look ominous but augur well. They are the final convulsions of something that is about to pass. The illness in this instance is the energetic attempts of an organism to free itself from a fatal element.

‘Those who have profited and who hope to profit for ever more from the errors of the past are uniting in order to prevent any change. The results of all this are the armaments, threats and prosecutions; but if you look more carefully you will see that it is all superficial. It is colossal but empty.

‘The spirit has gone: it has moved elsewhere. All these millions of armed men who practice daily in preparation for a universal war of extinction no longer hate those whom they must fight, and not one of the leaders has the courage to declare war. Recriminations can already be heard rising up from below and, recognizing their claim to justice with a great and sincere compassion, something above is already beginning to respond to them.

‘Mutual understanding inevitably approaches at an appointed time and it is far closer than we suppose. I do not know if this is because I am about to depart from the world and the light emanating from beyond the horizon has already clouded my vision, but I believe our world is entering an epoch where the words “Love one another” will be accepted without arguments about whether it was a man or a God who spoke them’ (Dumas, fils).

Only by fulfilling the law of love in its true rather than limited meaning, i.e. as the supreme law that does not admit any exceptions, can one find salvation from the terrible, increasingly disastrous, and apparently hopeless situation of the Christian nations today.

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