Christianity and Patriotism
establish a censorship, they bribe the newspapers, they seize the control of religion in the schools. But the spiritual force which moves the world slips away from them; it is not in books, indeed, nor in newspapers: it is always free and cannot be taken captive; it lies in the depths of men's consciousness. This most powerful and unfettered free force is that which is manifest in the soul of man, when alone he thinks over the phenomena of the world, and afterwards cannot help uttering his thoughts to his wife, his brother, his friend, to all the men with whom he is in contact and from whom he thinks it a sin to hide what he considers the truth. No milliards of roubles, no millions of troops, no institutions, nor wars, nor revolutions, can do what can be done by the simple expression by a free man of what he considers right apart from what exists and from what is impressed upon him.
One free man says truthfully what he thinks and feels in the midst of thousands of men who by their words and actions are maintaining the exact opposite. It might be supposed that the man who has spoken out his thoughts sincerely would remain a solitary figure, and yet what more often happens is that all the others, or a large proportion of them, have for long past been thinking and feeling exactly the same, only they do not say so freely. And what was yesterday the new
94
