Author’s Foreword

Tolstoi relates that when he was in the Army he saw one of his brother officers strike a man who fell out from the ranks during a march. Tolstoi said to him:—

‘Are you not ashamed to treat a fellow human being in this way? Have you not read the Gospels?’

The other officer replied:—

‘And have you not read Army Orders?’

This retort will always be thrown back at the spiritual man who tries to take the direction of the material. To me it seems a very wise one. Those who lead men to the conquest of material things have no need of justice and charity.

Nevertheless I think it important that there should be men—even if they are scorned—who urge their fellow beings to other religions than the religion of the material. Now, those who should play this part (to whom I have given the name of ‘clerks’ in the medieval sense of the word) have not only ceased to do so, but are playing an exactly contrary part. Most of the influential moralists of the past fifty years in Europe, particularly the men of letters in France, call upon mankind to sneer at the Gospel and to read Army Orders.

This new teaching seems to me all the more deserving of serious attention because it is addressed to a humanity which of its own volition is now established in materialism with a decisiveness hitherto unknown. And I shall begin by showing this to be true.