does not, for him who would live in brotherhood, eliminate the necessity of yielding up his life, of being eaten by lice, and of dying, whilst at the same time always striving against violence, preaching non-resistance, exposing violence, and above all giving an example of non-resistance and of self-sacrifice. Dreadful and difficult as is the position of a man living the Christian life, amidst the life of violence, he has no path but that of struggle and sacrifice-sacrifice without end. One must realise the gulf that separates the verminous, famished millions from the over-fed, over-dressed rich; and to fill up this gulf we need sacrifices, and not the hypocrisy with which we now try to hide from ourselves the depth of the gulf. A man may lack the strength to throw himself into the gulf-but it cannot be escaped by anyone who seeks after life. We may be unwilling to go into it, but let us be honest about it, and say so, and not deceive ourselves with hypocritical pretences. And, after all, the gulf is not so terrible. Or, if it be terrible, yet the horrors which await us in a worldly way of life are more terrible still. . . . Only that love is true love which knows no limit of sacrifice-even unto death. -The Root of the Evil.

Mingle with a crowd, especially a town crowd; look at those harassed, agitated, sickly faces; recall your own life and that of those you have known intimately; remember the violent deaths, the cases of suicide of which you have heard-and then ask yourself the cause of all those miseries, and of that despair which ends in self-murder. You will see, terrible as it seems, that nine-tenths of human sufferings spring from the teaching of the world; that all these sufferings are really needless, and yet unavoidable, and that the majority of men are

The teaching

fields, and

martyrs to the teaching of the world. . . . of the world says - Leave house, and brothers, leave the village for the unhealthy town, pass your life in a hot bathroom lathering strangers, or as a petty tradesman counting coppers in a shop like a cellar; or as a public prosecutor in trials, immersed in papers, and occupied in making the lives of unhappy wretches still worse; or as a State minister, always signing in haste useless documents; or as a captain, always bent on killing others-live this unnatural life, that must end in a painful death, and you shall receive nothing either in this world or in the world to come! And this call all obey.

Christ says Take up thy cross and follow me; that is, bear patiently the lot awarded thee, and obey God; yet none obey. But the first worthless man, fitted for nothing but murder, who wears epaulettes, and takes it into his head to say, Take not up a cross, but a knapsack and gun, and follow me to inflict and undergo misery and certain death, is listened to and obeyed by all. Abandoning family, parents, wives and children, dressed like buffoons, and obeying the will of the first man of higher rank they meet, starving, worn out by long marches, they follow they know not where, like a herd of cattle to a slaughter-house. But they are not cattle, they are men. They cannot but know whither they are driven. With the unanswered question of 'Why?' on their lips, with despair in their hearts, they march to die from cold, and hunger, and disease, from the fire of bullets and cannon balls. They slay and are slain; yet not one of them knows why or wherefore this is so. They are roasted alive, flayed, disembowelled; but the next day, at the call of the trumpet, the

survivors march with their eyes open to suffering and death. Yet no one finds any difficulty in obeying such commands. Not only the sufferers themselves, but their fathers and mothers see no difficulty; nay, they even urge their children to disobedience.

There were, it is said, at one time Christian martyrs, but they were exceptions; it has been calculated that their number has reached 380,000 during eighteen hundred years. But if we count the martyrs to the world, for every single martyr to Christ we shall find a thousand martyrs to the world, whose sufferings have been a hundred-fold greater. By death in wars alone during the nineteenth century have fallen thirty millions of men! These men were all martyrs to the teaching of the world. Putting the teachings of Christ aside, had they but forborne to follow that of the world what sufferings and death would they have escaped!

Christ calls us to no sacrifice; on the contrary, he offers us not the worse but the better part of life. Loving all men, he teaches them to refrain from maintaining themselves by violence, and from the mere heaping up of riches, even as men teach men to refrain from brawls and drunkenness. He tells men that, living without violence and without property, they will be happier than they are now, and by the example of his life confirms his words. He tells them that, living after his teaching, they must be prepared to die at any moment by violence or cold or hunger, and must not calculate on a single hour of life. And this seems to us a terrible demand for victims. Yet it is only a confirmation of the conditions under which every one of us inevitably lives. The disciple of Christ should be prepared at

every instant for suffering and death. But is not the disciple of the world exactly in the same position ? Truly, all that we do to secure to ourselves prosperity is exactly what the ostrich does, who hides his head that he may not see his death. Nay, we do worse than the ostrich; for in order doubtfully to assure our lives in a doubtful future, we certainly spoil them in what might be a certain present. Devoting our whole life to making preparations for its security, we have no time at all for life itself.-My Religion.

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CHAPTER IV

SCIENCE, FALSE AND TRUE

WORK for science? But the word science is a term so vague and ill-defined that what some people consider to be science is considered by others to be utterly futile, and this is the case not only with outsiders but even with the priests of science themselves. While those savants who favour a spiritual explanation of life look upon jurisprudence, philosophy, and even theology as the most necessary and important of sciences, the Positivists consider these very sciences as childish twaddle devoid of scientific value; and vice versâ, sociology, which the Positivists look upon as the science of sciences, is considered by the theologians, philosophers, and spiritualists as an arbitrary and useless collection of observations and assertions. But more than this, even in one and the same branch of philosophy or natural science each system has ardent defenders and equally ardent detractors, equally competent, yet holding diametrically opposite opinions. Finally, does not each year witness fresh scientific discoveries, which, after exciting the wonder of the mediocrities of the whole world, and bringing fame and fortune to their inventors, are eventually found to be nothing but ridiculous errors even by those who promulgated them?

Just as it was not exactly in the creation of the world in six days, the wound-curing serpent, etc., that the