Robert Hunter (author) - Christian Quotes

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His [Tolstoy's] interpretation of the Christian teaching is very similar to that which prevailed in nearly every peasant community in western Europe in the Middle Ages. Like doctrines gave rise to a peasant movement in Armenia in the ninth century, and in the fourteenth; a revolt of the peasants in England resulted from the teaching of the Lollards. The Anabaptists, the Hussites, and many other sects of Christian communists arose in the following centuries. There is a peculiar soil in which these doctrines take root. Wherever the chief economic problem is the unjust distribution of land, Christian communism seems to appeal to the masses.

Robert Hunter
The greatest obstacle that confronted Tolstoy lies rooted deep in the soul of man. It is the fear of poverty and the dread of want which ages of struggle with man and beast and with all the adverse elements of nature has bred in us. Surely history teaches us too well the nature and character of man for us to believe readily that there are many fathers and mothers who would ever consent to become Christians on the conditions set forth by Tolstoy.... who to day would fail to condemn unreservedly any father who would take his babies from a comfortable home to live hungry and shelterless in the forests and fields. From the dawn of the world the chief duty of a parent has been to keep his family secure from want.

Robert Hunter
Can no way be found by which every man may be assured of what, let us remember, Tolstoy always had, a wife and children, a good bed, a safe and warm sheltering roof, proper clothes, some leisure and peace for the improvement of the mind, a few books and pictures, a little music, and best of all, no fear for his old age and no dread of want for himself or his loved ones?... Such a way was found in the communism of the early Christians.

Robert Hunter
In recent centuries the only near spiritual relative of Tolstoy is the English poet, who in the fourteenth century, in the form of Piers Plowman, preached religious ideas so strikingly like those of Tolstoy. They are both individualists and they seek individual, not social, regeneration.... Both point to the simple toiling God-fearing peasant as one expressing the ideal of the Christian life and service.

Robert Hunter
Whatever in the gospel will not interfere with what we like to do, or feel we must do, we gladly believe; and to the rest we close our eyes. Most of us do this half-unconsciously, perhaps, but in our innermost selves we can hardly help knowing that we are not Christians, and that there is in the gospel something fundamental—a vital message, an essence—which we do not wish to understand.

Robert Hunter
If it is impossible to induce fathers to abandon their families, how much more impossible would it be to induce mothers? When Tolstoy sought to live the truly Christian life, the immediate obstacle he found in his path was his own wife.... The next world had to take care of itself. She was burdened with dependents in this world, and like nearly every other mother-animal in creation, she insisted, in so far as she was able, upon feeding and protecting her young. She was as impervious as a tigress, concealing the lair of her young, to the teaching that a Christian must be willing to sacrifice everything and everybody in pursuit of truth.

Robert Hunter
Tolstoy deplored all the modern tendencies toward immense congregations of people in limited areas, on the ground that they were making more and more impossible the truly Christian life. In cities the rich find little restraint to their lusts, while the lusts of the poor are greater there than in the country, and they satisfy them up to the limit of their means. In the country, Tolstoy could still see the possibility of men living a Christian life; in the cities he saw no such possibility. Cities had therefore to be uprooted and destroyed. The people had to get back to the soil.

Robert Hunter
In the time of Jesus almost everybody worked in small shops or on the land and then sold or bartered their own products in the towns. There were no vast industrial centers, no great factories, no steam power or electricity. Everyone knew his neighbor by name. There was no highly developed division of labor, nor were there great extremes of wealth and poverty. Such economic conditions are ideal—or at least as nearly ideal as they can ever be—for the spread of Christian communism. And so they are still in many parts of Russia.

Robert Hunter
Among them exists an immense opportunity for the spread of views such as Tolstoy held, but instead of espousing their cause or seeking in any manner to organize the peasants for cooperative action, he [Tolstoy] invariably taught them submission, nonresistance to evil, loyalty to their masters, and the most extreme form of Christian humility and service.

Robert Hunter
In many of his biographical writings Tolstoy makes clear that, in pursuit of a virtuous life, he had to struggle hard with his own nature, habits, and animal passions, and had to overcome early training and education; but in this drama he shows that, in attempting to be a Christian, he had to battle constantly, often bitterly, with his own family, with the Church, and with all the social, economic, and political conditions and institutions that surrounded him.

Robert Hunter