Tolstoy Weekend

I'm currently reading The Kingdom of God is Within you by Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy influenced both Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr. (as well as a good deal of other civil rights activists that I am unaware of) with this book. On the back of my book writes "[Ghandi was] inspired by its message of nonresistance to evil, the Mahatma declared it a source of 'independent thinking, profound morality, and truthfulness.' " Tolstoy's own views actually are actually quite simply a gathering of Jesus' words and the reflections of a good deal of unremarkable (or merely lesser known) priests, theologians and quite a few anabaptists/quakers. On page 36 of my book he tells

Tolstoy tells a story of how both church and state's tendency to "overawe" people who take Christ's commands seriously (such as loving one's neighbors, which by default he argues necessitates and demands nonviolent resistance) :

It is just what has taken place of late years at recruiting sessions; at a table before the zertzal – the symbol of the Czar’s authority– in the seat of honor under the life-size portrait of the Czar, sit dignified old officials, wearing decorations, conversing freely and easily, writing notes, summoning men before them, and giving orders. Here, wearing a cross on his breast, near them, is a prosperous-looking old priest in a silken cassock, with long gray hair flowing on to his cope, before a lectern who wears the golden cross and has a Gospel bound in gold.

They summon Ivan Petroff. A young man comes in, wretchedly, shabbily dressed, and in terror, the muscles of his face working, his eyes bright and restless; and in a broken voice, hardly above a whisper, he says, “I – by Christ’s law – as a Christian – I cannot.” “What is he muttering?” asks the president, frowning impatiently and raising his eyes from his book to listen. “Speak louder,” the colonel with shining epaulets shouts to him. “I – I as a Christian ...” And at last it appears that the young man refuses to serve in the army because he is a Christian. “Don’t talk nonsense. Stand to be measured. Doctor, may I trouble you to measure him. He is all right?” “Yes.” “Reverend father, administer the oath to him.”

No one is the least disturbed by what the poor scared young man is muttering. They do not even pay attention to it. “They all mutter something, but we’ve no time to listen to it, we have to enroll so many.” The recruit tries to say something still. “It’s opposed to the law of Christ.” “Go along, go along; we know without your help what is opposed to the law and what’s not; and you soothe his mind, reverend father, soothe him. Next: Vassily Nikitin.” And they lead the trembling youth away. And it does not strike anyone – the guards, or Vassily Nikitin, whom they are bringing in, or any of the spectators of this scene – that these inarticulate words of the young man, at once suppressed by the authorities, contain the truth, and that the loud, solemnly uttered sentences of the calm, self-confident official and the priest are a lie and a deception.