But will people be able to live without obeying some human power?  How will they conduct their common business?  What will become of the different states?  What will happen to Ireland, Poland, Finland, Algeria, India, and all the Colonies?  How will the nations group themselves?

Such questions are put by men who are accustomed to think that the conditions of life of all human societies are decided by the will and direction of a few individuals, and who therefore imagine that the knowledge of how future life will shape itself is accessible to man.  Such knowledge, however, never was, nor can be, accessible.

If the most learned and best educated Roman citizen, accustomed to think that the life of the world was guided by the decrees of the Roman Senate and Emperors, had been asked what would become of the Roman Empire in a few centuries, you may be sure that he could never have foretold the barbarians, or feudalism, or the papacy, or the disintegration of the peoples and their reunion into large states.  The same is true of those Utopias of the twenty-first century, with flying machines, X-rays, electric motors, and socialist organizations of life, which are so daringly drawn by the Bellamys, Morrises, Anatole Frances, and others.

Men cannot know what form social life will take in the future; in fact, their thinking they can know it is harmful in itself.  Nothing so interferes with the straight current of their lives as this fancied knowledge of what the future life of humanity ought to be.  The life of individuals as well as of communities consists only in this: that men and communities continually move towards the unknown, changing not because certain men have formed brain-spun plans as to what these changes should be, but in consequence of a tendency inherent in all men to strive towards moral perfection, attainable by the infinitely varied activity of millions and millions of human lives.  Therefore, the relation in which men will stand towards one another and the forms into which they shape society depend entirely on the inner characters of men, and not at all on forecasting this or that form of life which they desire to adopt.  Yet those who do not believe in God’s law always imagine that they can know what the future state of society should be, and not only define this future state, but do all sorts of things they themselves admit to be evil in order to mold human society to the shape they think it ought to take.

That others do not agree with them, and think that social life should be quite differently arranged, does not disturb them.  Having assured themselves that they can know what the future of society ought to be, they not only decide this theoretically, but also act.  They fight, seize property, imprison and kill men to establish the form in which, according to their ideas, mankind will be happy.

The old argument of Caiaphas, “It is expedient that one man should die, and that the whole nation perish not,” seems irrefutable to such people.  Of course they must kill, not only one man, but hundreds and thousands of men, if they are fully assured that the death of these thousands will give welfare to millions.  People who do not believe in God and His law cannot but argue thus.  Such people live in obedience only to their passions, to their reasoning, and to social hypnotism, and have never considered their destiny of life, nor wherein the real happiness of humanity consists.  Or, if they have thought about it, they have decided that this cannot be known.  These people, who do not know wherein the welfare of a single man lies, imagine that they know, and know beyond all doubt, what is needed for the welfare of society as a whole.  They know it so certainly that, to attain such welfare, as they understand it, they commit deeds of violence, murders, and executions, which they themselves admit to be evil,

At first it seems strange that men, who do not know what they themselves need, can imagine that they know clearly and indubitably what the whole community needs. And yet, it is just because they do not know what they need that they imagine they know what the whole community needs.

The dissatisfaction they (lacking all guidance for their lives) dimly feel, they attribute not to themselves, but to the badness of the existing forms of social life, which differ from the one they have invented.  And in cares for the rearrangement of society they find a possibility of escaping from consciousness of the wrongness of their own lives.  That is why those who do not know what to do with themselves are always particularly sure what ought be done with society as a whole.  The less they know about themselves, the more sure they are about society.  Such men, for the most part, are either very thoughtless youths, or are the most depraved of social leaders, such as the Marats, Napoleons, and Bismarcks.  And that is why the history of the nations is full of the most terrible evil-doings.

The worst effect of this imaginary foreknowledge of what society should be, and of this activity directed to the alteration of society, is that it is just this supposed knowledge and this activity which more than anything else hinders the movement of the community along the path natural to it for its true welfare.

Therefore, to the question, “What will the lives of the nations be like, which cease to obey power?” we reply that we not only do not know, but ought not to suppose that anyone can know.  We do not know in what circumstances these nations will be placed when they cease to obey power.  But we know indubitably what each one of us must do, in order for those conditions of national life should be the very best.  We know, without the least doubt, that in order to make those conditions the very best, we must first of all abstain from those acts of violence which the existing power demands of us, as well as from those to which men fighting against the existing power to establish a new one invite us, and we must therefore not obey any power.  We must refuse to submit, not because we know how our life will shape itself in consequence of our ceasing to obey power, but because submission to a power that demands that we should break the law of God is a sin.  This we know beyond doubt, and we also know that, as a consequence of not transgressing God’s will and not sinning, nothing but good can come to us or to the whole world.