Thought and noted:
1) I found jotted down: “Every victory over the enemy is an enlargement of one’s own strength.” I ought to remember that now especially. There is a struggle going on between my spiritual and animal self, and all that I gain for the former, by all this will I weaken the latter. I carry over from one scale of the weights to another. If I fall into temptation, it means a rolling down the road to evil; if I resist, it is the beginning of a rolling on a new road towards the good.
2) It is astonishing how we get accustomed to the illusion of one’s own individuality, separateness from the world. We see, we feel—that life compels us every minute to feel our union and dependence on the world, makes us feel our incompleteness; and we nevertheless believe that we ourselves, our very selves, is something in the name of which we can live. However, when you understand this illusion clearly, then you are surprised, how you could not have seen that you are not a piece of a whole, but a manifestation in time and space, of something timeless and infinite.
Women have always recognised the power of men over them. And it could not have been otherwise in an unchristian world. Men are the stronger and men have ruled. It was the same in all the worlds (with the exception of the doubtful Amazons and the law of maternity), and it is the same now among .0999 of mankind. But Christianity has appeared and has recognised perfection not in strength but in love, and by this all the subjected, the captive, the slaves and the women have been freed. But that the freedom of slaves and women be not a calamity, it is necessary that the freed be Christians, i.e., that they affirm their life in the service of God and people, and not in the service of themselves. Slaves and women are not Christians, and nevertheless they are freed. And they are terrible. They act as the main-spring of all the calamities of the world.
What must be done? Bring slaves and women back again into slavery? That is impossible to do, because there is no one who will do it: Christians cannot subject. And non-Christians will no longer surrender themselves into slavery, but will fight. They will fight among themselves and one or the other will subject and hold the Christians in slavery. What must be done? One thing must be done: attract people to Christianity, turn them into Christians. It is possible to do this only by fulfilling in life the law of Christ.
Help me, Lord. Help me. Come into me, awake in me.
Apr. 13. Moscow. If I live.
To-day April 27. Grinevka.[303]
The 3rd day here. I am all right. A little indisposed....
The latter days in Moscow I spent finishing Carthago delenda est. I am afraid I have not finished it, and that it is still before me. Still I did quite a lot. Here I have not worked at all.