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nydus/The Kingdom of God Is Within YouPublic

Tolstoy describes true Christianity as a non-hierarchical, nonviolent, non-coercive pursuit, and criticizes institutional Christianity as a deceptive corruption.

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in God, not in Christ, not even in the teaching, but in a person, as is the case in Catholicism, or in several persons, as in Orthodoxy, or in a book, as in Protestantism. The more Christianity became diffused, and the greater was the crowd of unprepared men which it embraced, the less it was understood, the more definitely was the infallibility of the comprehension asserted, and the less did it become possible to understand the true meaning of the teaching. As early as the time of Constantine the whole comprehension of the teaching was reduced to a résumé confirmed by the worldly power⁠—a résumé of disputes which took place in a council⁠—to a creed of faith, in which it says, I believe in so-and-so, and so-and-so, and finally, in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, that is, in the infallibility of those persons who call themselves the church, so that everything was reduced to this, that a man no longer believes in God, nor in Christ, as they have been revealed to him, but in what the church commands him to believe.

But the church is holy⁠—the

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