A doctor, a specialist in insanity, told a story that one summer day when he was leaving the asylum, the lunatics accompanied him to the street door. "Come for a walk in the town with me?" the doctor suggested to them. The lunatics agreed, and a small band followed the doctor. But the further they proceeded along the street where healthy people were freely moving about, the more timid they became, and they pressed closer and closer to the doctor, hindering him from walking. At last they all began to beg him to take them back to the asylum, to their meaningless but customary way of life, to their keepers, to blows, strait waistcoats, and solitary cells.
This is just how men of to-day huddle in terror and draw back to their irrational manner of life, their factories, law courts, prisons, executions, and wars, when Christianity calls them to liberty, to the free, rational life of the future coming age.
People ask, "How will our security be guaranteed when the existing organization is suppressed? What precisely will the new organization be that is to replace it? So long as we do not know precisely how our life will be organized, we will not stir a step forward."
An explorer going to an unknown country might as well ask for a detailed map of the country before he would start.
If a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for. It is the same with the life of humanity. If it had a programme of the life which awaited it before entering a new stage, it would be the surest sign that it was not living, nor advancing, but simply rotating in the same place.
The conditions of the new order of life cannot be known by us because we have to create them by our own labors. That is all that life is, to learn the unknown, and to adapt our actions to this new knowledge.
That is the life of each individual man, and that is the life of human societies and of humanity.
CHAPTER XI.
THE CHRISTIAN CONCEPTION OF LIFE HAS ALREADY ARISEN IN OUR SOCIETY, AND WILL INFALLIBLY PUT AN END TO THE PRESENT ORGANIZATION OF OUR LIFE BASED ON FORCE—WHEN THAT WILL BE.
The Condition and Organization of our Society are Terrible, but they
Rest only on Public Opinion, and can be Destroyed by it—Already
Violence is Regarded from a Different Point of View; the Number of those
who are Ready to Serve the Government is Diminishing; and even the
Servants of Government are Ashamed of their Position, and so often Do
Not Perform their Duties—These Facts are all Signs of the Rise of a
Public Opinion, which Continually Growing will Lead to No One being
Willing to Enter Government Service—Moreover, it Becomes More and More
Evident that those Offices are of No Practical Use—Men already Begin to
Understand the Futility of all Institutions Based on Violence, and if a
Few already Understand it, All will One Day Understand it—The Day of
Deliverance is Unknown, but it Depends on Men Themselves, on how far
Each Man Lives According to the Light that is in Him.