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 LETTER TO PETER VERIGIX, THE DOUKHOBOR LEADER— 1

Dear Brother,

L M. Tregoubof has sent on to me your letter to him, and I was much pleased to read it — pleased to get to know about you and, as it were, to hear your voice, and to know wliat you are thinkinir about, and how you think, and what is vital to you. I see by your letter that you live in a spiritual world and are occupied with spiritual questions. For a man's welfare, that is the chief thing : for only in sjjirit is man free, and only by the spirit is God's work done, and only in spirit does man feel himself at one with God, for ' God is a spirit.'

The thoughts expressed in your letter about the advantage of living intercourse over intercourse by means of dead books, pleased me much, and I share them. I write books, and therefore know all the evil they produce. I know how people who do not wish to receive the truth, can avoid reading books or under- standing what goes against the grain and exposes them, and I know how they can misinterpret and pervert — as they have done with the Gospels. All this 1 know, but yet 1 consider books to be, in our time, inevitable. I say ^in our time^ in contradistinction to the Gospel times, when there were no printing-presses and books were not used, and the means of communication were vocal. Then it was possible to do without books, for the enemies of truth had none. But now one cannot leave this powerful engine entirelv for the [ 167 ]