strength.”[1] He distrusts the resolution of the refractory Gontcharenko. He fears “that this young man may have been carried away by vanity and vainglory, not by the love of God.”[2] To the Doukhobors he writes that they should not persist in their refusal of obedience out of pride, but “if they are capable of so doing, they should save their weaker women and their children. No one will blame them for that.” They must persist “only if the spirit of Christ is indeed within them, because then they will be happy to suffer.”[3] In any case he prays those who are persecuted “at any cost not to break their affectionate relations with those who persecute them.”[4] One must love even Herod, as he says in a letter to a friend: “You say, ‘One cannot love Herod.’—I do not know, but I feel, and you also, that one must love him. I know, and you also, that if I do not love him I suffer, that there is no life in me.”[5]
The Divine purity, the unvarying ardour of this love, which in the end can no longer be contented even by the words of the Gospel: “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” because he finds in them a taint of egoism![6]
- ↑ Letter to a friend, 1900. (Correspondence.)
- ↑ To Gontcharenko, February 2, 1903 (ibid.).
- ↑ To the Doukhobors of the Caucasus, 1898 (ibid.).
- ↑ To Gontcharenko, January 17, 1903 (ibid.).
- ↑ To a friend, November, 1901. (Correspondence.)
- ↑ “It is like a crack in a pneumatic machine; all the vapour of egoism that we wish to drain from the human soul re-enters by it.” He ingeniously strives to prove that the original text has been wrongly read; that the exact wording of the Second Commandment was in fact “Love thy neighbour as Himself (as God).” (Conversations with Teneromo.)
