Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/35

26 me, so I say to you—you know all this better than I do. And you know that you have an ill-feeling toward our mutual friend, and this is wrong, and occasions you pain.

Yes, it is necessary that the truth should prevail. This is most important, and God knows it, and has put us into such conditions that we cannot escape from the truth; we cannot escape physical and yet less moral sufferings, neither can we escape death. And we are all in this truth, and our friend also, and one cannot say about anyone that he is in falsehood. To say that he is in falsehood is the same as to say that he is in the mire, and to therefore abandon him. If he be in the mire, then so much the more should we pity and cleanse him ; he cannot like it any more than any of us.

You say that "where two or three are gathered in My name" there alone is life. Not so. Life is also in him who for twenty-five years has been sitting alone in prison, and on a tower.

But this is neither here nor there; what I want to say above all is this —The living man is he who continues advancing in the direction illuminated by the lantern which advances in front