s heavy load on the
understanding and this future humiliation? In socialism, one says.
But socialism, if it is not yet bourgeois, is almost so. "The
starved proletariat and the rejected bourgeois have different
economic opinions," says Merezhkovsky, "but their ideal is the same,
the pursuit of happiness." As it is but a step from the prudence of
the bourgeois to the exasperated state of the starved proletariat,
this pursuit can lead to nothing else but international atrocities
of militarism and chauvinism. Progress having become the sole
ambition of the cultivated barbarians, satiety became their
religion, and the only hope of escaping from this barbarism was to
adopt the religion of love, founded by Jesus. Jesus said to those
who were treated with violence, and who, in turn, had used violence
in trying to free themselves: "Truth (love) will set you free."
These words, which identify truth with love, contain in themselves
the profoundest social and personal morality. They inspired the
first martyrs of Christianity; but in time they were forgotten by
the Church. Succumbing to the "diabolical seduction of power,"
religion itself became a power, an autocracy; people submitted to
this power, and thus the Byzantine and Russian orthodoxy came into
existence. In this manner, the morals of the government,
antichristian in essence, became the doctrine of Christianity; and
the particular morals of the latter became transformed into a
mysterious gospel of life, relegating its aspirations to an
existence beyond the tomb. Now there is nothing for Christianity to
do but return to its first sources and develop the principles of
universal religion found there. One should no longer be concerned
with heavenly and personal advantage, but with earthly affairs and
social conditions; instead of being conquered by the government one
should conquer it, permeate it with one's spirit, and thus realize
the prophecy in the Apocalypse of the millennium of the saints on
earth, and destroy the forms of the power of the government, the
laws, and the empire. Such a renewal of Christianity demands an
energetic struggle, self-forgetfulness, and martyrs. But where is
one to find the necessary forces? Merezhkovsky does not see them in
the States of western Europe, because the "intellectuals" there are
antichristians and are congealed in their bourgeois positivism.
"Above these Christian states, above these old Gothic stores," says
Merezhkovsky, "rises, he