Leo. N. Tolstoy Tow letters to M. Gandy. 1909

I letter
I have now received your most interesting letter, which brought me a great joy. God help our dear brothers and co-workers in the Transvaal. The same struggle of the soft against the hard, humility and love against pride and violence is more evident in our country every day, especially in one of the sharpest clashes (в значении «столкновение») between religious law and wordly law – in refusals of military service. Rejections are becoming more and more frequent.
I would not like exclude the word «reincarnation», because, in my opinion, faith in reincarnation can never be as strong as faith in the indestructibility («неумираемость») of the soul and in the justice and love of God. However, do as you you wish.
Thus, I will translate my letter into the Hindu language and I can only rejoice in its distribution (в значении «распространению»).
I think competition, i.e. monetary encouragement, in a religious matter is inappropriate. If I can serve as your publication, I will be very happy. Of course. I greet you fraternally (в значении «братски») and rejoice at fellowship with you.


II letter
Got your magazine Indian Opinion and was glad to know everything that is written there about non-resistance (в значении «несопротивление»). And I wanted to tell you the thoughts that caused this reading in me.
The longer I live, and especially now, when I vividly feel the nearness of death, I want to tell others what I feel  especially vividly and which, in my opinion, is of great importance, namely, what is really called non-resistance, there is nothing else than the teaching of love, not perverted by false interpretations.
That love, i.e. striving of human souls for unity, and the activity resulting from this striving, is the highest and only law of human life, and every person feels and knows this in the depths of his soul (as we see it more clearly in children), knows until he is entangled by the false teaching of the world. This law was proclaimed by all, both Indian and Chinse and Jewish, Greek, Roman sages (в значении «мудрецами») of the world. I think that it was expressed most clearly by Christ, who even directly said this alone is the whole law and the prophets (пророки). But not enough of this, foreseen the perversion to which this law is and may be subjected, he directly pointed out the danger of perverting it, which is characteristic of people who live by worldly interests, namely,  that they allow themselves to defend these interests by force, i.e. , as he said, to answer blows with blows, to take back the appropriated objects by force, et cetera.
He knows, as every rational person cannot fail to know, that the use of violence is incompatible with love as the basic law of life, that the as soon as violence is allowed, in any case, the insufficiency of the law of love is recognized and therefore the law itself is denied.The entire Christian civilization, so brilliant in appearance, grew up on this obvious and strange, sometimes conscious, mostly unconscious, misunderstanding and contradiction. In essence, as soon as opposition to love was allowed, so there was no longer and could not be love as the law of life, and there was no law of life, except for violence, i.e. the power of the strongest. This is how Christian humanity lived for 19 centuries. True, at all time people have been guided by violence alone in the arrangement of their lives. The difference between the life of Christian peoples and all others lies only in the fact that in the Christian world the law of love was expressed so clearly and definitely, as it was not expressed in any other religious teaching, and that the people of the Christian world solemnly accepted this law and at the same time allowed themselves violence and built they life on violence…/