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Skidmore

(37,364 posts)
Thu Nov 20, 2014, 08:30 PM Nov 2014

A Letter to a Hindu

Some reading for the interested. Letters from Tolstoy to Gandhi on love and violence.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/7176/7176-h/7176-h.htm

Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills, and in it you too have the only method of saving your people from enslavement. In very ancient times love was proclaimed with special strength and clearness among your people to be the religious basis of human life. Love, and forcible resistance to evil-doers, involve such a mutual contradiction as to destroy utterly the whole sense and meaning of the conception of love. And what follows? With a light heart and in the twentieth century you, an adherent of a religious people, deny their law, feeling convinced of your scientific enlightenment and your right to do so, and you repeat (do not take this amiss) the amazing stupidity indoctrinated in you by the advocates of the use of violence—the enemies of truth, the servants first of theology and then of science—your European teachers.
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