22 April, 2019

The Kingdom of God is Within You by Tolstoy

http://eremita.di.uminho.pt/gutenberg/4/3/3/7/43372/43372.txt

For good reason Christ's only speech which is not meek, but
reproachful and cruel, was directed to the hypocrites and against
hypocrisy. What corrupts, angers, bestializes, and, therefore,
disunites men, is not thieving, nor spoliation, nor murder, nor
fornication, nor forgery, but the lie, that especial lie of
hypocrisy which in the consciousness of men destroys the distinction
between good and evil, deprives them of the possibility of avoiding
the evil and seeking the good, deprives them of what forms the
essence of the true human life, and so stands in the way of every
perfection of men.

Men who do not know the truth and who do evil, awakening in others
a sympathetic feeling for their victims and a contempt for their
acts, do evil only to those whom they injure; but the men who know
the truth and do the evil, which is concealed under hypocrisy, do
evil to themselves and to those whom they injure, and to thousands
of others who are offended by the lie, with which they attempt to
conceal the evil done by them.