Men have an irresistible tendency to believe that no one sees them when they themselves do not see, like children who close their eyes so that no one may see them.  (Lichtenberg)

Men of our time believe that all the insanity and cruelty of our lives, the enormous wealth of a few, the envious poverty of the majority, the wars, and every form of violence are perceived by nobody, and that nothing prevents us from continuing to live thus.  Error continues, nevertheless, to be error, even when it is accepted by the majority.  (Daily Reading, 6- 8, and the conclusion)

Having accepted Christian doctrine in the form corrupted by the Church, the pagans, satisfied at first with the new doctrine, withdrew little by little from the Christianity of the Church, and ended by living without any religious conception of life or the rules of conduct resulting from it.  Since the majority of men are unable to live without a common rule of conduct, life, as I have said, gradually becomes unhappier.  It will not be able to continue to exist in its present form.

Farm laborers, dispossessed of the land, and consequently of the possibility of enjoying the fruit of their labor, hate the landed proprietors and capitalists who enslave them.  The proprietors and the capitalists, knowing the sentiments they inspire in the workers, distrust them, doubt them, and seek to keep them in submission by the organized force of government.  Thus it is that the situation of the workers is continually aggravated and their dependence upon the rich increases.  At the same time the wealth of the rich, their power over the workers, their fear, and their hate continue to increase.

This is equally the cause of the progressive increase of armaments of nation against nation and of the expense caused by employing workmen for military preparation.  And these preparations have international carnage as their only end.  These murders are committed because all Christian people (not individuals, but people united together in states) hate each other and are ready at any moment to hurl themselves at each other.

Thus it is that all of the great powers, by observing antiquated patriotic traditions, oppress one or several groups of nations and force them to participate in the life of the dominating nations that they hate.  For example, Austria, Prussia, England, Russia, and France oppress Poland, Ireland, India, Finland, the Caucasus, and Algeria.  This is the way that, apart from the hatred of the poor, of the rich, and of independent states, the hatred of oppressed nations for their oppressors is developing and spreading.

The worst is that all these hatreds, so contrary to human nature, are not condemned as bad sentiments, but, on the contrary, are exalted, and raised to the pinnacle of virtues.  The hatred of the oppressed workers for the rich is praised in the same degree as love of liberty, fraternity, and equality.  The hatred of Germans for French, English for Americans, Russians for Japanese, and vice versa, is considered a patriotic virtue.  The hatred of Poles for Russians and Prussians, and Prussians and Russians for Poles and Finns, is even more intense. 

But the plagues to which I have drawn attention are not sufficient to demonstrate the impossibility of continuing our present mode of life.  If our world possessed a rule of religious conduct, we could look upon the evils that inflict it as temporary, occasional phenomena.  In reality, the religion that we see professed is a mendacious one.  There are even several – Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, etc. – and all are in a state of permanent hostility.  There exists also a false science, equally divided, whose denominations quarrel with each other.  There are political and international lies of different parties – lies of art, lies of tradition and habit, and lies of all sorts – but no rule of moral conduct imposed by a religious conception.

The men of the Christian world also live the lives of beasts, take their selfish interests for guides, and are in a state of perpetual struggle among themselves.  What distinguishes them from the beasts are the latter’s constant need of food and of claws for defense, while men pass with dizzy haste from roads to railroads, from animal locomotion to steam, from the spoken word and manuscripts to printing, the telegraph, and the telephone, from sailing vessels to transatlantic liners, and from steel weapons to cannon, machine guns, bombs, and airplanes.  It is this overwrought life we lead that is getting madder and madder, and unhappier and unhappier, because men, instead of keeping to a spiritual, moral principle that would unite them in a society of peace and concord, are guided by their bestial instincts, which they seek to satisfy by trading on their intellectual faculties.