A brief summary of Leo Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You, Chapter 5
When I read chapter 5 of Tolstoy’s magnum opus, titled “Contradiction between our life and our Christian conscience,” I was floored by some startling similarities to today. Even though it was first published in 1894, Tolstoy documents church leaders and writers of his day, warning of the dangers of wars to the nations economy and Christian morals. Ending his astonishing chapter with, “But most striking of all is the contradiction between the Christian law of the brotherhood of men existing in the conscience and the necessity under which all men are placed by compulsory military service of being prepared for hatred and murder – of being at the 
same time a Christian and a gladiator,” is nearly enough to drive home the the point to any discerning Christian. However, he filled this chapter with enough history and observation to leave you speechless by that point.
He quotes Frederick Passy, “We are ruining ourselves in order to be able to take part in senseless wars of the future or to pay interest on debts we have incurred by senseless and criminal wars of the past. We are dying of hunger so as to secure the means of killing each other.” This is from 1890 and sounds to any attentive American as if was written today.
But even more startling is the congressional speech from Sir Wilfrid Lawson, “You send a boy to Sunday school, and you tell him: ‘Dear boy, you must love your enemies. If another boy strikes you you mustn’t hit him back, but try to reform him by loving him.’ Well. The boy stays in the Sunday school till he is fourteen or fifteen and then his friends send him into the army. What has he to do in the army? He certainly won’t love his enemy; quite the contrary, if he can only get at him, he will run him through with his bayonet. That is the nature of all religious teaching in this country. I do not think that this is a very good way of carrying out the precepts of religion. I think if it is a good thing for a boy to love his enemy, it is good for a grown-up man.”
Wilson further explains, “There are in Europe twenty-eight millions of men under arms to decide disputes, not by discussion, but by murdering one another. That is the accepted method for deciding disputes among Christian nations. This method is, at the same time, very expensive, for, according to the statistics I have read, the nations of Europe spent in the year 1872 a hundred and fifty millions sterling on preparations for deciding disputes by means of murder. It seems to me, therefore, that in such a state of things one of two alternatives must be admitted: either Christianity is a failure, or those who have undertaken to expound it have failed in doing so. Until our warriors are disarmed and our armies disbanded, have not the right to call ourselves a Christian nation.”
The similarities, even to the phrases “a Christian nation” are astounding. One could spend all day unpacking these thoughts under today’s events but I think a reader will see it quickly.
In conclusion, I want to bring up one more observation that brings all this to a troubling realization. Tolstoy quotes G. D. Bartlet from a conference in the subject of the duty of Christian ministers to preach against war: “If I understand the Scriptures, I say that men are only playing with Christianity so long as they ignore the question of war. I have lived a longish life and have heard our ministers preach on universal peace hardly half a dozen times. Twenty years ago, in a drawing room, I dared in the presence of forty persons to moot the proposition that war was incompatible with Christianity; I was regarded as an arrant fanatic. The idea that we could get on without war was regarded as unmitigated weakness and folly.”
Think about that response in light of the context that these men confess following the Man that reprimanded his apostle with, “Those who live by the sword will die by the sword.”
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