Christians and the Law-Courts is excerpted from the book What I Believe. When What I Believe was released in 1884, an attempt was made in Russia to suppress this book, but it circulated clandestinely in large numbers, in hectographed copies and also in volumes printed abroad and smuggled into the country. No adequate reply to Tolstoy's terrific onslaughts upon Church and State was produced, and within a single generation, in Russia, the institutions he attacked had crumbled to dust.
What I Believe has been translated into all civilized languages and has circulated far and wide. Nowhere have the views they contain been adequately met. If Tolstoy's theory be right (and he claims for it Christ's authority), nothing can, and nothing should, save our industrial, political, or national existence from destruction.
AYLMER MAUDE, translator