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The evil from which the men of the Christian world suffer is that they have temporarily lost religion.

Some people, having come to see the discord between the existing religion and the degree of mental and scientific development attained by humanity at the present time, have decided that in general no religion whatever is necessary. They live without religion and preach the uselessness of any religion of whatever kind. Others, holding to that distorted form of the Christian religion which is now preached, likewise live without religion, professing empty external forms, which cannot serve as guidance for men.

Yet a religion which answers to the demands of our time does exist and is known to all men, and in a latent state lives in the hearts of men of the Christian world. Therefore that this religion should become evident to and binding upon all men, it is only necessary that educated men–the leaders of the masses–should understand that religion is necessary to man, that without religion men cannot live a good life, and that what they call science cannot replace religion; and that those in power and who support the old empty forms of religion should understand that what they support and preach under the form of religion is not only not religion, but is the chief obstacle to men’s appropriating the true religion which they already know, and which can alone deliver them from their calamities. So that the only certain means of man’s salvation consists merely in ceasing to do that which hinders men from assimilating the true religion which already lives in their consciousness.

XI

I had finished this writing when news came of the destruction of six hundred innocent lives opposite Port Arthur. It would seem that the useless suffering and death of these unfortunate deluded men who have needlessly and so dreadfully perished ought to disabuse those who were the cause of this destruction. I am not alluding to Makaroff and other officers–all these men knew what they were doing, and wherefore, and they voluntarily, for personal advantage, for ambition, did as they did, disguising themselves in pretended patriotism, a pretence not condemned merely because it is universal. I allude rather to those unfortunate men drawn from all parts of Russia, who, by the help of religious fraud, and under fear of punishment, have been torn from an honest, reasonable, useful, laborious family life, driven to the other end of the world, placed on a cruel, senseless machine for slaughter, and torn to bits, drowned along with this stupid machine in a distant sea, without any need or any possibility of advantage from all their privations, efforts, and sufferings, or from the death which overtook them.

In 1830, during the Polish war, the adjutant Vilijinsky sent to St. Petersburg by Klopitsky, in a conversation held in French with Dibitch, in answer to the latter’s demand that the Russian troops should enter Poland, said to him:–

“Monsieur le Marechal, I think that in that case it will be quite impossible for the Polish nation to accept this manifesto….”

“Believe me, the Emperor will make no further concessions.”

“Then I foresee that, unhappily, there will be war, that much blood will be shed, there will be many unfortunate victims.”

“Do not think so; at most there will be ten thousand who will perish on both sides, and that is all,”[1] said Dibitch in his German accent, quite confident that he, together with another man as cruel and foreign to Russian and Polish life as he was himself,–Nicholas I,–had the right to condemn or not to condemn to death ten or a hundred thousand Russians and Poles.

[1] Vilijinsky adds on his own behalf, “The Field-Marshal
did not then think that more than sixty thousand
Russians alone would perish in this war, not so much
from the enemy’s fire as from disease–nor
that he would himself be amongst their number.”