Page:Tolstoy - Pamphlets.djvu/40

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PERSONAL CHRISTIAN LIFE
31

advancing along this way, and are at present probably advancing, in the depth of your consciousness. I, for my part, the nearer I approach to bodily death the clearer I see this and recognise it, not only in contemplation but in actual experience. I am learning—not only towards living men who are present, but towards those absent, and towards animals, towards dead people—to repress in myself every shade of contempt, irony, irritation, not to speak of animosity; and it is wonderful how in the measure of one's attainment of this one is recompensed by lucidity of thought, by joy of life, by fruitfulness, adaptiveness of labour.

In this work, you probably know this—ill-feeling towards one man paralyses the powers of life in the same way as ill-feeling, hatred, towards the whole human race. The glass is dimmed, and does not transmit light owing to one piece of dirt as well as to a whole barrowful.


On Compromise.

It is always said, when a man has not attained that after which he has been striving, when he has not drawn