The Kingdom of God is Within You: Or, Christianity Not as a Mystical Doctrine, but as a New Life-Conception.

TOLSTOI, Count Leo. [Tolstoy].

$1,850.00

Item Number: 124089

London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1894.

First edition in English of the culmination of 30 years of Tolstoy’s thinking which lays out a new organization for society based on an interpretation of Christianity focusing on universal love. Octavo, original cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine. Translated from the original Russian by A. Delano. In near fine condition. Rare.

The culmination of 30 years of Tolstoy's thinking, The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a key text for the Tolstoyan proponents of nonviolence, of nonviolent resistance, and of the Christian anarchist movement. Tolstoy had a profound moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870's which he outlined in his work, A Confession. His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him to become a fervent Christian anarchist and pacifist. His ideas of nonviolent resistance which he shared in this work had a profound impact on figures such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth that the work "overwhelmed" him, and "left an abiding impression". He listed The Kingdom of God, as well as John Ruskin's Unto This Last and the poet Shrimad Rajchandra (Raychandbhai), as the three most important modern influences in his life. Reading this book opened up the mind of the world-famous Tolstoy to Gandhi, who was still a young protester living in South Africa at the time.