sense indicated that if some men claim to decide who is to be
subjected to violence of all kinds for the benefit of others,
these men to whom violence is applied may, in turn, arrive at a
similar conclusion with regard to those who have employed
violence to them, and though the great religious teachers of
Brahmanism, Buddhism, and above all of Christianity, foreseeing
such a perversion of the law of love, have constantly drawn
attention to the one invariable condition of love (namely, the
enduring of injuries, insults, and violence of all kinds without
resisting evil by evil) people continued--regardless of all that
leads man forward--to try to unite the incompatibles: the virtue
of love, and what is opposed to love, namely, the restraining of
evil by violence. And such a teaching, despite its inner
contradiction, was so firmly established that the very people who
recognize love as a virtue accept as lawful at the same time an
order of life based on violence and allowing men not merely to
torture but even to kill one another.

For a long time people lived in this obvious contradiction
without noticing it. But a time arrived when this contradiction
became more and more evident to thinkers of various nations. And
the old and simple truth that it is natural for men to help and
to love one another, but not to torture and to kill one another,
became ever clearer, so that fewer and fewer people were able to
believe the sophistries by which the distortion of the truth had
been made so plausible.

In former times the chief method of justifying the use of
violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a
divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs,