“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” John 8:32 “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both...

In the year 1884 I wrote a book under the title, My Religion. In this book I really expounded what my religion is. In expounding my belief in Christ’s teaching, I could not help but express the reason...

Among the first answers to my book there came some letters from the American Quakers. In these letters, which express their sympathy with my views concerning the unlawfulness for Christianity of all v...

The same impression of a desire to conceal, to pass in silence, what I attempted so carefully to express in my book, has been produced on me by the criticisms upon it. When my book appeared, it was, a...

Thus, both the information received by me after the publication of my book, as to how the Christian teaching in its direct and true sense has without interruption been understood by the minority of me...

Now I will speak of another putative comprehension of Christianity, which interferes with the correct comprehension of it⁠—the scientific comprehension. The churchmen regard as Christianity that conce...

There are many causes for the failure to comprehend Christ’s teaching. One cause lies in this, that men assume that they understand the teaching, when they decide, as the churchmen do, that it was tra...

The removal of the contradiction between life and consciousness is possible in two ways⁠—by a change of life or by a change of consciousness, and in the choice of one of the two there can be no doubt....

The cultured people of the higher classes try to drown the consciousness of the necessity of changing the present order of things, which is becoming all the time clearer and clearer; but life, continu...

People frequently say that if Christianity is a truth, it ought to have been accepted by all men at its very appearance, and ought at that very moment to have changed the lives of men and made them be...

The condition of the Christian nations in our time has remained as cruel as it was in the times of paganism. In many relations, especially in the enslavement of men, it has become even more cruel than...

Christianity in its true meaning destroys the state. Thus it was understood from the very beginning, and Christ was crucified for this very reason, and thus it has always been understood by men who ar...

The condition of Christian humanity, with its prisons, hard labor, gallows, with its factories, accumulations of capital, with its taxes, churches, saloons, houses of ill fame, ever growing armaments,...

I had ended this two years’ labor, when, on the ninth of September, I happened to travel on a train to a locality in the Governments of Túla and Ryazán, where the peasants had been starving the year b...

I had ended this two years’ labor, when, on the ninth of September, I happened to travel on a train to a locality in the Governments of Túla and Ryazán, where the peasants had been starving the year b...

The train which I came across the ninth of September, and which carried soldiers, with their guns, cartridges, and rods, to the starving peasants, in order to secure to the rich proprietor the small f...

When the eyes shall be opened to this terrible deception which is practised on men, one must marvel how preachers of the religion of Christianity and morality, educators of youth, simply good, intelli...

But, strange to say, those very men, who in our time assert more than anyone else that they care for the amelioration of human life, and who are regarded as the leaders in public opinion, affirm that ...

Cannot man make this effort? According to the existing theory, indispensable for hypocrisy, man is not free and cannot change his life. “Man cannot change his life, because he is not free; he is not f...

Come to your senses, men, and believe in the Gospel, in the teaching of the good. If you shall not come to your senses, you will all perish, as perished the men who were killed by Pilate, as perished ...

In The Non-Resistant, Vol. I, No. 4, Hopedale, Milford, Mass., Feb. 15, 1845. —⁠Wiener ↩ Not a pamphlet, but an article in The Non-Resistant, Vol. I, No. 4, and very imperfectly quoted by Tolstoy. —⁠W...