Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/193

 XII

LETTER ON NON-RESISTANCE : TO ERNEST H. CROSBY, OF NEW YORK

Dear Mr. Crosby,

I am very glad to have news of your activity, and to hear tliat your work begins to attract attention. Fifty years ago Lloyd Garrison's Declaration of Non- Resistance* only estranged people from him ; and Ballou'st fifty years^ labour in the same direction was constantly met by a conspiracy of silence. J now read with great pleasure in the Voice admirable thoughts by American writers on this question of Non-Resistance. I need only demur to the notion expressed by Mr. Bemis. It is an old but unfounded libel upon Christ to suppose that the expulsion of the cattle from the temple indicates that Jesus beat people with a whip and advised his disciples to behave in the same way. I

The opinions expressed by these writers, especially by Heber Newton and G. D. Herron, are quite correct, but unfortunately they do not reply to the question Christ put to men, but to anotlier question which has been substituted for it by those chief and most dangerous

William Lloyd Garrison was adopted at a Peace Convention held in Boston, September 18-20, 1838.
 * The Declaration of Non-Resistance drawn up by

f Adin Ballou (1803-1890), a Massachusetts Restorationist minister, founder of Hopedale Community (1842-1856), and author of Christian Non- Resistance.

t Christ's use of a scourge is mentioned only in St. John's Gospel. Our Revised Version, following the Greek, indi- cates that the scourge was for * the sheep and the oxen,' [ 177 ] M