Version of Transcription A Book That Changed My Life, October 13, 1927

sian and his teaching without an overwhelming consciousness of what is happening in Russia today where the followers of Tolstoy are so sternly repressed. The doctrinaire approach to the problems of labor by the revolutionists is the antithesis of Tolstoy’s religious impulse to humbly share in the sacrament of work; their forceful expropriation of the landed gentry is but a sorry travesty of Tolstoy’s dream of voluntary renunciation of all property which its owner could retain only by the use of force; their treatment of bourgeoisie and peasant alike ignores his reiterated statement that there is no human situation which may be successfully approached without human affection. The counsels of perfection these are, it is true, but nevertheless they are the counsels of the greatest religious teachers. Through this book and others Tolstoy may have prepared our Western minds for the message of Gandhi, which came in so different a guise and is yet so similar in its indictment of Western civilization and equally insistent in its call to labor and simple living. A message such as this comes from time to time and strikes harshly upon a permanent sore spot in the careless hearts of men.