ajority? To disseminate
knowledge? All this has been tried, and is being done with great fervor.
All these imaginary methods of improvement represent the chief methods of
self-oblivion and of diverting one's attention from the consciousness of
inevitable perdition. The boundaries of States are changed, institutions
are altered, knowledge is disseminated; but within other boundaries, with
other organizations, with increased knowledge, men remain the same
beasts, ready any minute to tear each other to pieces, or the same slaves
they have always been, and always will be, while they continue to be
guided, not by religious consciousness, but by passions, theories, and
external influences.

Man has no choice; he must be the slave of the most unscrupulous and
insolent amongst slaves, or else the servant of God, because for man
there is only one way of being free--by uniting his will with the will of
God. People bereft of religion, some repudiating religion itself, others
recognizing as religion those external, monstrous forms which have
superseded it, and guided only by their personal lusts, fear, human laws,
and, above all, by mutual hypnotism, cannot cease to be animals or
slaves, and no external efforts can extricate them from this state; for
only religion makes a man free. And most of the people of our time are
deprived of it.

VIII

"But, in order to abolish the evil from which we are suffering," those
will say who are preoccupied by various practical activities, "it would
be necessary that not a few men only, but all men, should bethink
themselves, and that, having done so, they should uniformly understand
the destination of their lives, in the fulfilment of the will of God and
in the service of one's neighbor.

"Is this possible?" Not only possible, do I answer, but it is impossible
that this should not take place. It is impossible for men not to bethink
themselves--_i.e._ impossible that each man should not put to himself the
question as to who he is and wherefore he lives; for man, as a rational
being, cannot live without seeking to know why he lives, and he has
always put to himself this question, and always, according to the degree
of his development, has answered it in his religious teaching. In our
time, the inner contradiction in which men feel themselves elicits this
question with special insistence, and demands an answer. It is impossible
for men of our time to answ