Part 2

However, perhaps science is strong in creating a bright future for mankind by other means? By clarifying the laws by which the universe exists, by discovering the means of influencing the forces laid down in matter, science gives us enormous power over nature. There was a time when man trembled before every formidable phenomenon of nature; now he is its master.

If the people of the ancient world, contemplating the future, could imagine what science is doing now, they would decide that the golden age of which their poets have always dreamed has arrived. But with all these conquests of the mind, the promised land still runs before us like a mirage. The profound ignorance of the masses of the people, the excessive toil, the abject misery, side by side with idleness and extravagance, are no less painfully felt in the age of electricity and steam than in the age of brutal barbarism. "Almshouses and prisons are as common companions of scientific progress," says Henry George, "as are luxurious palaces and splendid shops. In the noisy capitals, on the streets flooded with asphalt and illuminated by electric suns, we, as everywhere, meet exhausted, gloomy, angry faces. Among the greatest accumulation of wealth, people die of hunger and sickly children suck the withered breasts of their mothers. Everywhere the thirst for profit and the worship of wealth indicate the power of the fear of want. The tragedy of the Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus has not lost its burning to this day." "What does it profit the Prometheus man that he has procured fire from heaven and made it his servant, that the spirits of earth and air obey him," asks the eminent learned Huxley, "if the kite of hope will forever tear at his entrails and keep him on the brink of utter destruction?" "I am not afraid to express the opinion," he says, "that if there is no hope of a great improvement in the condition of the greater part of the human family; If it be true that the growth of knowledge, which results in the acquisition of greater power over nature, and the riches conferred by power, will in no way alter the intensity of want and its spread, with all the physical and moral degeneration that accompanies it among the masses of the people, I would gladly welcome the approach of some obliging comet which, washing away all this history, would put a desirable end to it." "This union of poverty with progress," remarked Henry George, "is the great mystery of our time. This is the central fact from which arise those industrial, social, and political difficulties which confuse the world, and which statesmen, philanthropists, and educators struggle with in vain. From it rise those clouds which obscure the future of the most progressive and independent nations. This is the riddle that the sphinx of fate has posed to our civilization and not to solve it means to perish. As long as all the growth of wealth, which is called material progress, is spent only on the formation of great fortunes, on the increase of luxury, and on the increasing contrast between the House of Plenty and the House of Need, so long can progress not be considered real and lasting." The reaction must come. It is necessary to renew the driving forces of civilization, to introduce new factors besides knowledge. Science, which promised to independently recreate on earth the kingdom of supreme truth and equality, must be declared bankrupt on this side. Instead of uniting under the command of heaven to fight against the common enemy - the kingdom of darkness and untruth, people with the banner of science in their hands fight for booty. The main motto of life became: "Who can eat whom, gnaws at him." As it is said in the Bible about Ishmael: "Hands of one against all, and of all against one" (Gen. 16:12). Every man for himself and for himself, that is, universal enmity, mutual distrust, irritation, anger, and nowhere is there peace, justice, pity, and love. The enemy falls, so much the better: in the fight the human race improves. Mercy is a crime, because it sacrifices the strong to the weak, and the rich in spirit and body to the lazy and frail, the world is moved, says science, and the world is dominated by the harsh, inexorable law of the struggle for existence. The logical consequence of such a view of life, of the factors of civilization, is Nietzscheanism. Nietzsche is an original, brilliant German thinker, a man of great, versatile talents. He is a critic, a poet, a philologist and, finally, a philosopher. The main theme of his literary philosophical activity is a fierce, open struggle against Christianity. Nietzsche thinks that the evils of modern life, all the calamities of our civilization, stem from the fact that we have submitted to the Gospel demands of love, meekness, and mercy. In his opinion, mankind will only have a brilliant prospect when it is freed from the moral fetters imposed on it by Jesus Christ. Give man full freedom, says Nietzsche; free him from the empty phantoms of conscience and passions, and you will be amazed at the power of the powers he has manifested. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of weak people will perish, will be crushed in the struggle, but on the other hand, the victor, drunk on their sweat and blood, will climb up the corpses, as if on steps, and lay the foundation for a new breed of creatures. It will no longer be just a "man", but a "Uebermensch", a "superman". The philosophy of the beggars is the consummation of Darwin's theory. According to Darwin, the entire long ladder of living beings, starting from the lowest organism and ending with the highest - man, is an uninterrupted chain of transition from one species to another. By means of the struggle for existence, since there are always more mouths than food, organisms are constantly improving: only the strongest specimens, the most adapted to the struggle, survive, and the rest are exterminated or themselves die out for lack of food. Any accidental advantage of the laws of heredity is assigned to the organism. Over the centuries, so many distinctive features have been accumulated in one or another species of animals that a new, more perfect type is formed. The same story repeats itself with him. The natural selection of those who are better adapted to the struggle for life and the law of heredity do not interrupt their work for a moment. In perfecting itself in this way, the organic world has at last worked out the type of man. Such a theory (even if we leave aside the question of the validity or falsity of its main propositions) is unproven. The beggars took the trouble to finish it, to put an end to the i's. If man, by a long chain of extinct species, is connected directly with the ape, descended from it, and the ape, in turn, from other lower organisms, then why do we stop at man? Not now, not tomorrow, not in a hundred years, but someday there must appear a creature even more adapted to life, even more perfect than man. To lead mankind along this path, where in the end the titans and demigods are seen, is such a great task, Nietzsche thinks, for the sake of which one should not be embarrassed by the requirements of religion, morality, conscience, and duty. The more evil is committed, the more strength and energy will be manifested, the sooner the "superman" will appear... "Be firm," Nietzsche bequeathed to his disciples, "do not succumb to pity, compassion, love, crush the weak, climb higher on their corpses; you are children of the highest breed; Your ideal is "superman". Terrible theory! It is not the best who triumph, but the strongest and most predatory. Goodness, love and truth must part and give way to violence, shamelessness and vice. Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, Herod the Great, Nero, Caesar Borgia - these are the exponents of the ideas of Nietzscheanism. Where is the happiness promised by science to all members of the human family, where is the triumph of the higher principles of truth? Where is universal altruism? Why does science with material progress not bring about an improvement in morals; Why doesn't evil uproot it? Alas, this is not her business. The causes of evil are of a moral nature, and science is powerless against moral evil. It can crush a rock, flatten a block of metal, but it is not given to it to soften a hard, callous heart. All her high-profile inventions, the glory of our century, are petty in their inner purpose, insignificant in the purposes they serve. Their service role is reduced to the promotion of exclusively material progress: the increase of man's power over the forces of nature, the accumulation of wealth and the external comforts of life. The apostles and philosophers, preaching the brotherhood of nations and proclaiming the rights of man, successfully fulfilled their high mission even without telegraph and telephone wires; the millions of wires that have covered the entire globe of the earth in our days serve mainly the stock exchange rogues and newspaper chatter about the political game of the moral Lilliputians. Science, for example, invented gunpowder, and the peace-loving Chinese, separated by his wall from the rest of the world, used it for centuries for amusement, making fireworks out of it [1]; and the militant European, who from the height of his culture so despises the backward Chinese, has added guns, cannons, and grenades to gunpowder, spends billions on their manufacture, and, through the inventions of Schwartz, Chapso, Berdan, Mauser, Lebed, Martini, Armstrong, Nordenfelt, Hotchkiss, Maxim, Krupne, and others, to whom the legion is also named, exterminates millions of his brothers. If we compare the amount of gunpowder, dynamite, and pyroxylin expended in sieges and bombardments to destroy peaceful human dwellings with the amount of the same explosives used to improve the means of communication for the peaceful rapprochement of peoples: to dig tunnels, to widen narrow mountain passes, to remove dangerous underwater rocks, stones, and reefs, then, from the point of view of the moral development of mankind, what a sad certificate that cultured Europe will have to issue! Scientific enlightenment alone will only give training of the mind, and if a person is a predatory person by nature, then education only sharpens his teeth, sharpens his claws. The mind serves to prepare and cultivate the soil conquered by other forces. Reason is the executive power, and the legislative power, the guiding power, belongs to the heart. The Gospel of nineteenth centuries ago declared: "Out of the heart proceed evil and good thoughts." The Divine Knower of the Heart, Christ the Saviour, was the first to point out to the world that the only source of social life is the spirit of man, and that the more perfect it is, the more perfect will be everything created by it. If you want the life around you to change, says Christianity, change yourself, educate your heart. Brotherly, loving life, the Kingdom of God on earth are possible; only they must be sought not somewhere around, not in something external, but within oneself, in one's heart. The heart is not the sphere of influence of science, but the realm of religion. It is impossible to breathe strength into the moral nature of man by external mechanical means. Science cannot force a person to change his will. By fear or compulsion it is possible to force him to renounce a bad action, but not from an evil will, which is an internal movement, not subject to external force. The moral renewal of man is conditioned by voluntary submission to a force that has such an attraction that binds the conscience, deeply agitates the feelings and inclinations, calls into action all that is good in them, and makes it possible to triumph over the inferior. Only the religion of the Gospel can be such a force for humanity. The Gospel, speaking to us about God as Perfect Love and Absolute Truth, about His attitude to the world and about our duties to it, fills our soul with reverent worship of the Supreme Being, awakens in us the desire to become worthy of His love, evokes obedience to His commandments as an immutable moral law. Christianity, and it alone, in the name of the Supreme Holiness, which is God Himself, tirelessly urges man to go forward and forward in moral growth. Hence the general conclusion is as follows. The highest universal ideal of all mankind is the ideal indicated by the Gospel: the Kingdom of God. The path to its realization is the moral renewal of the entire spiritual nature of man, the development of a Christian worldview, the education of the will in the spirit of evangelical love and truth. Religion is the driving force on this path. Such a conclusion can in no way be considered humiliating to science, and it has no reason to dispute it. Science has its own special field of activity, also very respectable, each success in which is in its own way also a great blessing for humanity. These two spheres - both the sphere of influence of religion and the sphere of influence of science - with a proper understanding of the matter do not at all contradict each other: they complement each other. And if there are clashes between representatives of religion and representatives of science, this is due to a sad misunderstanding: the inability to understand the boundaries of one's competence, the desire to invade other people's borders. There is a medieval story about two knights who fought to the death in a duel, accusing each other of an obvious lie, as it seemed to them. They argued about the color of the shield: one said that the shield was white; another claimed that the shield was blue. The argument flared up and ended in a duel, and both were right. The shield was painted in different colors on both sides: one blue, the other white.

The dispute between the representatives of science and religion is explained by a similar misunderstanding. Both science and religion deal with one and the same subject: with the huge world organism as a whole, and, in particular, with man, who in the boundless universe is, as it were, a special, separated, closed world in himself. Responding to the needs of our mind and heart, science and religion illuminate the mystery of the world from two different angles. Science determines the eternal, immutable laws according to which the life of the universe proceeds; discovers and subordinates to the human mind more and more new forces of nature, establishes the degree of external, physical dependence of man on his environment; In short, science sets itself the goal of giving the fullest possible answer to the question: how does the world live? Religion has a different task; It answers the question: how can a person live in the world? What relationship should he have to the world and to the One Who is above the world? The lawyer asked Jesus Christ: "Teacher! With the same question, every Christian turns to the religion established by the Saviour, firmly believing that he will not only find the answer he needs in the teaching of the Gospel, but will also acquire in a close, living prayerful union with God the moral strength necessary for the eternal meaning to be hidden in each individual action, feeling, and word. giving the right to live.

Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Luke says: "To what shall I liken the Kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and put into three measures of flour, until everything was soured" (13: 20-21). Speaking in the spirit of this parable, it should be added that the religion of Christ is necessary to mankind, like leaven to flour, and until people are all imbued with the spirit of the Gospel, Christianity cannot be replaced by anything. To this, it may be objected that there are a considerable number of people with higher motives of behavior and a life as pure as crystal, who nevertheless quite openly express their disbelief in religious teachings, fundamentally denying their influence on their lives and behavior. A typical representative of these can be the famous French scientist Littré, "this saint who does not believe in God", as he was aptly described by another French writer - Caro. How, it will be asked, are these facts to be reconciled with our conception of religion as the centre of all the vital forces which move and reconstruct the modern social world? The explanation is very simple. The Christian religion, in the nineteen centuries of its existence, has left a strong and indelible mark on a long series of generations, on their laws and institutions, on their intellectual and moral education, on their way of thinking in general. A large part of the ideas first proclaimed to the world by Christianity have now become common property, and the opponents of Christianity owe everything they are justly proud of entirely to the Gospel, although they do not admit it. But let the clouds cover the sun, the daylight that surrounds us is still not original, but only the result of a luminary hidden from us. When the clouds dissipate, then the sky will brighten, shine in all its glory, the sun will pour streams of warmth and light, and a clear, jubilant day will come. But when will all this be? No one can give an answer.

To the question when this hour will come, the Great Teacher exhorts people to work with all their strength for its speedy arrival. And there can be no other answer. No one can tell people when the day and hour of the Kingdom of God will come, because the coming of this hour does not depend on anyone else but on themselves. "The answer is the same," says a well-known thinker, "as the answer of that sage who, to the question of a passer-by: "How far is it to the city?" answered: "Go." How can we know how far we are from the goal towards which humanity is approaching, when we do not know how humanity will move towards this goal, on which it depends whether to go or not to go, to stop, to moderate its movement or to intensify it? All we can know is what we, the human beings, must do and must not do in order for this kingdom of God to come; And we all know this. The Gospel speaks clearly. And we should stop doing what we shouldn't do; only everyone begins to do what we must do; only for each of us to live with all the light that is in us, so that the promised Kingdom of God, to which the heart of every person is drawn, may immediately come." The attainment of the Kingdom of God is a divine-human deed, a consequence of man's acceptance, assimilation of God's truth, proclaimed to people by Jesus Christ. The closer a person comes to God in his heart, the closer the Kingdom of God will become to a person. The coming of the Kingdom of God, insofar as it depends on man, is therefore conditioned by the Christian education of the will, its education in the spirit of the Gospel love and truth. Kolb. Cultural History, pp. 77-78: "The Chinese were familiar with gunpowder, but never had firearms." Peshel. "Ethnology", p. 372: "the Chinese knew gunpowder before the Europeans, they used it only for fireworks" ^

II. Christian Education of the Will

However, perhaps science is strong in creating a bright future for mankind by other means? By clarifying the laws by which the universe exists, by discovering the means of influencing the forces laid down in matter, science gives us enormous power over nature. There was a time when man trembled before every formidable phenomenon of nature; now he is its master.

If the people of the ancient world, contemplating the future, could imagine what science is doing now, they would decide that the golden age of which their poets have always dreamed has arrived. But with all these conquests of the mind, the promised land still runs before us like a mirage. The profound ignorance of the masses of the people, the excessive toil, the abject misery, side by side with idleness and extravagance, are no less painfully felt in the age of electricity and steam than in the age of brutal barbarism. "Almshouses and prisons are as common companions of scientific progress," says Henry George, "as are luxurious palaces and splendid shops. In the noisy capitals, on the streets flooded with asphalt and illuminated by electric suns, we, as everywhere, meet exhausted, gloomy, angry faces. Among the greatest accumulation of wealth, people die of hunger and sickly children suck the withered breasts of their mothers. Everywhere the thirst for profit and the worship of wealth indicate the power of the fear of want. The tragedy of the Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus has not lost its burning to this day." "What does it profit the Prometheus man that he has procured fire from heaven and made it his servant, that the spirits of earth and air obey him," asks the eminent learned Huxley, "if the kite of hope will forever tear at his entrails and keep him on the brink of utter destruction?" "I am not afraid to express the opinion," he says, "that if there is no hope of a great improvement in the condition of the greater part of the human family; If it be true that the growth of knowledge, which results in the acquisition of greater power over nature, and the riches conferred by power, will in no way alter the intensity of want and its spread, with all the physical and moral degeneration that accompanies it among the masses of the people, I would gladly welcome the approach of some obliging comet which, washing away all this history, would put a desirable end to it." "This union of poverty with progress," remarked Henry George, "is the great mystery of our time. This is the central fact from which arise those industrial, social, and political difficulties which confuse the world, and which statesmen, philanthropists, and educators struggle with in vain. From it rise those clouds which obscure the future of the most progressive and independent nations. This is the riddle that the sphinx of fate has posed to our civilization and not to solve it means to perish. As long as all the growth of wealth, which is called material progress, is spent only on the formation of great fortunes, on the increase of luxury, and on the increasing contrast between the House of Plenty and the House of Need, so long can progress not be considered real and lasting." The reaction must come. It is necessary to renew the driving forces of civilization, to introduce new factors besides knowledge. Science, which promised to independently recreate on earth the kingdom of supreme truth and equality, must be declared bankrupt on this side. Instead of uniting under the command of heaven to fight against the common enemy - the kingdom of darkness and untruth, people with the banner of science in their hands fight for booty. The main motto of life became: "Who can eat whom, gnaws at him." As it is said in the Bible about Ishmael: "Hands of one against all, and of all against one" (Gen. 16:12). Every man for himself and for himself, that is, universal enmity, mutual distrust, irritation, anger, and nowhere is there peace, justice, pity, and love. The enemy falls, so much the better: in the fight the human race improves. Mercy is a crime, because it sacrifices the strong to the weak, and the rich in spirit and body to the lazy and frail, the world is moved, says science, and the world is dominated by the harsh, inexorable law of the struggle for existence. The logical consequence of such a view of life, of the factors of civilization, is Nietzscheanism. Nietzsche is an original, brilliant German thinker, a man of great, versatile talents. He is a critic, a poet, a philologist and, finally, a philosopher. The main theme of his literary philosophical activity is a fierce, open struggle against Christianity. Nietzsche thinks that the evils of modern life, all the calamities of our civilization, stem from the fact that we have submitted to the Gospel demands of love, meekness, and mercy. In his opinion, mankind will only have a brilliant prospect when it is freed from the moral fetters imposed on it by Jesus Christ. Give man full freedom, says Nietzsche; free him from the empty phantoms of conscience and passions, and you will be amazed at the power of the powers he has manifested. Dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of weak people will perish, will be crushed in the struggle, but on the other hand, the victor, drunk on their sweat and blood, will climb up the corpses, as if on steps, and lay the foundation for a new breed of creatures. It will no longer be just a "man", but a "Uebermensch", a "superman". The philosophy of the beggars is the consummation of Darwin's theory. According to Darwin, the entire long ladder of living beings, starting from the lowest organism and ending with the highest - man, is an uninterrupted chain of transition from one species to another. By means of the struggle for existence, since there are always more mouths than food, organisms are constantly improving: only the strongest specimens, the most adapted to the struggle, survive, and the rest are exterminated or themselves die out for lack of food. Any accidental advantage of the laws of heredity is assigned to the organism. Over the centuries, so many distinctive features have been accumulated in one or another species of animals that a new, more perfect type is formed. The same story repeats itself with him. The natural selection of those who are better adapted to the struggle for life and the law of heredity do not interrupt their work for a moment. In perfecting itself in this way, the organic world has at last worked out the type of man. Such a theory (even if we leave aside the question of the validity or falsity of its main propositions) is unproven. The beggars took the trouble to finish it, to put an end to the i's. If man, by a long chain of extinct species, is connected directly with the ape, descended from it, and the ape, in turn, from other lower organisms, then why do we stop at man? Not now, not tomorrow, not in a hundred years, but someday there must appear a creature even more adapted to life, even more perfect than man. To lead mankind along this path, where in the end the titans and demigods are seen, is such a great task, Nietzsche thinks, for the sake of which one should not be embarrassed by the requirements of religion, morality, conscience, and duty. The more evil is committed, the more strength and energy will be manifested, the sooner the "superman" will appear... "Be firm," Nietzsche bequeathed to his disciples, "do not succumb to pity, compassion, love, crush the weak, climb higher on their corpses; you are children of the highest breed; Your ideal is "superman". Terrible theory! It is not the best who triumph, but the strongest and most predatory. Goodness, love and truth must part and give way to violence, shamelessness and vice. Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, Herod the Great, Nero, Caesar Borgia - these are the exponents of the ideas of Nietzscheanism. Where is the happiness promised by science to all members of the human family, where is the triumph of the higher principles of truth? Where is universal altruism? Why does science with material progress not bring about an improvement in morals; Why doesn't evil uproot it? Alas, this is not her business. The causes of evil are of a moral nature, and science is powerless against moral evil. It can crush a rock, flatten a block of metal, but it is not given to it to soften a hard, callous heart. All her high-profile inventions, the glory of our century, are petty in their inner purpose, insignificant in the purposes they serve. Their service role is reduced to the promotion of exclusively material progress: the increase of man's power over the forces of nature, the accumulation of wealth and the external comforts of life. The apostles and philosophers, preaching the brotherhood of nations and proclaiming the rights of man, successfully fulfilled their high mission even without telegraph and telephone wires; the millions of wires that have covered the entire globe of the earth in our days serve mainly the stock exchange rogues and newspaper chatter about the political game of the moral Lilliputians. Science, for example, invented gunpowder, and the peace-loving Chinese, separated by his wall from the rest of the world, used it for centuries for amusement, making fireworks out of it [1]; and the militant European, who from the height of his culture so despises the backward Chinese, has added guns, cannons, and grenades to gunpowder, spends billions on their manufacture, and, through the inventions of Schwartz, Chapso, Berdan, Mauser, Lebed, Martini, Armstrong, Nordenfelt, Hotchkiss, Maxim, Krupne, and others, to whom the legion is also named, exterminates millions of his brothers. If we compare the amount of gunpowder, dynamite, and pyroxylin expended in sieges and bombardments to destroy peaceful human dwellings with the amount of the same explosives used to improve the means of communication for the peaceful rapprochement of peoples: to dig tunnels, to widen narrow mountain passes, to remove dangerous underwater rocks, stones, and reefs, then, from the point of view of the moral development of mankind, what a sad certificate that cultured Europe will have to issue! Scientific enlightenment alone will only give training of the mind, and if a person is a predatory person by nature, then education only sharpens his teeth, sharpens his claws. The mind serves to prepare and cultivate the soil conquered by other forces. Reason is the executive power, and the legislative power, the guiding power, belongs to the heart. The Gospel of nineteenth centuries ago declared: "Out of the heart proceed evil and good thoughts." The Divine Knower of the Heart, Christ the Saviour, was the first to point out to the world that the only source of social life is the spirit of man, and that the more perfect it is, the more perfect will be everything created by it. If you want the life around you to change, says Christianity, change yourself, educate your heart. Brotherly, loving life, the Kingdom of God on earth are possible; only they must be sought not somewhere around, not in something external, but within oneself, in one's heart. The heart is not the sphere of influence of science, but the realm of religion. It is impossible to breathe strength into the moral nature of man by external mechanical means. Science cannot force a person to change his will. By fear or compulsion it is possible to force him to renounce a bad action, but not from an evil will, which is an internal movement, not subject to external force. The moral renewal of man is conditioned by voluntary submission to a force that has such an attraction that binds the conscience, deeply agitates the feelings and inclinations, calls into action all that is good in them, and makes it possible to triumph over the inferior. Only the religion of the Gospel can be such a force for humanity. The Gospel, speaking to us about God as Perfect Love and Absolute Truth, about His attitude to the world and about our duties to it, fills our soul with reverent worship of the Supreme Being, awakens in us the desire to become worthy of His love, evokes obedience to His commandments as an immutable moral law. Christianity, and it alone, in the name of the Supreme Holiness, which is God Himself, tirelessly urges man to go forward and forward in moral growth. Hence the general conclusion is as follows. The highest universal ideal of all mankind is the ideal indicated by the Gospel: the Kingdom of God. The path to its realization is the moral renewal of the entire spiritual nature of man, the development of a Christian worldview, the education of the will in the spirit of evangelical love and truth. Religion is the driving force on this path. Such a conclusion can in no way be considered humiliating to science, and it has no reason to dispute it. Science has its own special field of activity, also very respectable, each success in which is in its own way also a great blessing for humanity. These two spheres - both the sphere of influence of religion and the sphere of influence of science - with a proper understanding of the matter do not at all contradict each other: they complement each other. And if there are clashes between representatives of religion and representatives of science, this is due to a sad misunderstanding: the inability to understand the boundaries of one's competence, the desire to invade other people's borders. There is a medieval story about two knights who fought to the death in a duel, accusing each other of an obvious lie, as it seemed to them. They argued about the color of the shield: one said that the shield was white; another claimed that the shield was blue. The argument flared up and ended in a duel, and both were right. The shield was painted in different colors on both sides: one blue, the other white.

The dispute between the representatives of science and religion is explained by a similar misunderstanding. Both science and religion deal with one and the same subject: with the huge world organism as a whole, and, in particular, with man, who in the boundless universe is, as it were, a special, separated, closed world in himself. Responding to the needs of our mind and heart, science and religion illuminate the mystery of the world from two different angles. Science determines the eternal, immutable laws according to which the life of the universe proceeds; discovers and subordinates to the human mind more and more new forces of nature, establishes the degree of external, physical dependence of man on his environment; In short, science sets itself the goal of giving the fullest possible answer to the question: how does the world live? Religion has a different task; It answers the question: how can a person live in the world? What relationship should he have to the world and to the One Who is above the world? The lawyer asked Jesus Christ: "Teacher! With the same question, every Christian turns to the religion established by the Saviour, firmly believing that he will not only find the answer he needs in the teaching of the Gospel, but will also acquire in a close, living prayerful union with God the moral strength necessary for the eternal meaning to be hidden in each individual action, feeling, and word. giving the right to live.

Jesus Christ in the Gospel of Luke says: "To what shall I liken the Kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and put into three measures of flour, until everything was soured" (13: 20-21). Speaking in the spirit of this parable, it should be added that the religion of Christ is necessary to mankind, like leaven to flour, and until people are all imbued with the spirit of the Gospel, Christianity cannot be replaced by anything. To this, it may be objected that there are a considerable number of people with higher motives of behavior and a life as pure as crystal, who nevertheless quite openly express their disbelief in religious teachings, fundamentally denying their influence on their lives and behavior. A typical representative of these can be the famous French scientist Littré, "this saint who does not believe in God", as he was aptly described by another French writer - Caro. How, it will be asked, are these facts to be reconciled with our conception of religion as the centre of all the vital forces which move and reconstruct the modern social world? The explanation is very simple. The Christian religion, in the nineteen centuries of its existence, has left a strong and indelible mark on a long series of generations, on their laws and institutions, on their intellectual and moral education, on their way of thinking in general. A large part of the ideas first proclaimed to the world by Christianity have now become common property, and the opponents of Christianity owe everything they are justly proud of entirely to the Gospel, although they do not admit it. But let the clouds cover the sun, the daylight that surrounds us is still not original, but only the result of a luminary hidden from us. When the clouds dissipate, then the sky will brighten, shine in all its glory, the sun will pour streams of warmth and light, and a clear, jubilant day will come. But when will all this be? No one can give an answer.

To the question when this hour will come, the Great Teacher exhorts people to work with all their strength for its speedy arrival. And there can be no other answer. No one can tell people when the day and hour of the Kingdom of God will come, because the coming of this hour does not depend on anyone else but on themselves. "The answer is the same," says a well-known thinker, "as the answer of that sage who, to the question of a passer-by: "How far is it to the city?" answered: "Go." How can we know how far we are from the goal towards which humanity is approaching, when we do not know how humanity will move towards this goal, on which it depends whether to go or not to go, to stop, to moderate its movement or to intensify it? All we can know is what we, the human beings, must do and must not do in order for this kingdom of God to come; And we all know this. The Gospel speaks clearly. And we should stop doing what we shouldn't do; only everyone begins to do what we must do; only for each of us to live with all the light that is in us, so that the promised Kingdom of God, to which the heart of every person is drawn, may immediately come." The attainment of the Kingdom of God is a divine-human deed, a consequence of man's acceptance, assimilation of God's truth, proclaimed to people by Jesus Christ. The closer a person comes to God in his heart, the closer the Kingdom of God will become to a person. The coming of the Kingdom of God, insofar as it depends on man, is therefore conditioned by the Christian education of the will, its education in the spirit of the Gospel love and truth. Kolb. Cultural History, pp. 77-78: "The Chinese were familiar with gunpowder, but never had firearms." Peshel. "Ethnology", p. 372: "the Chinese knew gunpowder before the Europeans, they used it only for fireworks" ^

Part 1

"The Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21). "The kingdom of God is taken by force, and those who use force take it away." (Matt. 11:12). Man is a highly complex creature. He is born and lives with a multitude of instincts and needs, diverse both in terms of their quality and in terms of the intensity of their manifestation. There are bodily and physiological needs, and there are spiritual needs: mental, aesthetic and moral. The satisfaction of the former creates a vegetative, animal life, a life without spiritual demands, without ideals, without lofty aspirations, in the strict sense not even life, but vegetation. It is a gross, inferior form of life. Satisfaction of mental abilities gives a person the opportunity to orient himself in life. With the help of science, with his inquisitive mind, with each new generation, man gets to know the universe better and better, the arena of his activity; he determines his abilities more correctly and becomes more skilful in controlling the forces of nature. But that's not all. Man is not only a spectator of the world drama taking place before him. He is an actor, a direct participant in it. The question of how he will use the powers he has learned, what role he will choose for himself: the role of a noble hero, a self-sacrificing worker for the common good, an empty vulgar, or a callous egoist, is a serious and fatal question. The consciousness of duty in itself does not yet give the strength to fulfill it. The source of all human actions is his will, and in order for a person to really take the rational, correct path of life that he has realized, it is not enough to recognize the mind, but to have a feat, an inner movement of the will. Properly satisfy the needs of the heart; give the heart such a task that would captivate and enchant it; Set before him an ideal that would conquer the will of man by the sheer charm of its greatness, and you will get life as it should be and can be. The abnormality of the life around us, the gloomy and cheerless background of it, are explained exclusively by neglect of the needs of the heart, are the result of a corrupt, evil will of man. Therefore, it would be thought that the science of the correct education of the will should have the widest application in our country as the basic science of life. Meanwhile, "the most surprising thing," says a French writer, "is that people are aware of the need for teachers and knowledge in everything else; there they make certain efforts; only the science of life they do not study and do not want to study." Look at how parents take care of the physical and mental development of their children and how little they think and how sick their hearts are about their moral education. How much attention, anxiety and care there is in one respect, and what amazing indifference, dispassionate calm in the other! They watch every open window in children's rooms; carefully protect children from the slightest dampness and barely noticeable draft; by the hour, like medicine, they are given food and put to bed, they are alert to barely audible hoarseness and cough in children; A slight increase in temperature in a child is anxiously monitored. Children begin to learn - all kinds of award-winning teaching aids, improved teaching methods are at their service; tutors, governesses, tutors, parents themselves monitor each preparation of the lesson.