Dostoyevsky was only a novelist. He originated no system, supplied no solution for the terrible problems with which our age is confronted in its efforts to organize social life. But he made one profoundly important social truth clear: man cannot organize the world for himself without God; without God he can only organize the world against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism. Moreover, it is not the purpose of faith in God to install us comfortably in our earthly life that we may go to sleep on it. On the contrary, faith disturbs use and continually upsets the too beautiful balance of our mental conceptions and our social structures. Bursting into a world that perpetually tends to close in upon itself, God brings it the possibility of a harmony which is certainly superior, but it is to be attained only at the cost of a series of cleavages and struggles coextensive with time itself. “I came not to bring peace, but a sword.” Christ is first and foremost the great disturber.
