The Kingdom of God is Within You

The Kingdom of God is Within You: Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life, translated from The Russian of Leo Tolstoy (Count Leo Tolstoi) by Constance Garnett. New York, 1894. The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a non-fiction book written by Leo Tolstoy. A philosophical treatise, the book was first published in Germany in 1894 after being banned in his home country of Russia. It is the culmination of thirty years of Tolstoy's thinking, and lays out a new organization for society based on a literal Christian interpretation. Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Part II, Chapter 15) that this book "overwhelmed" him and "left an abiding impression." Gandhi listed Tolstoy's book, as well as John Ruskin's Unto This Last and the poet Shrimad Rajchandra, 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.