All the prophets and saviours of the world have been for the Spirit as against the letter--and the teachings of all religions have in their turn become literalised and fossilised! Perhaps there has been no greater anti-literal than Jesus of Nazareth, and yet perhaps no religion has become more a thing of forms and dogmas than that which passes under his name. Even his counsels of Gentleness and Love--which one would indeed have thought might escape this process--have been corrupted into mere prescriptions of morality, such as those of Non-resistance, and of philanthropic Altruism. It seems strange indeed that so great a man as Tolstoy should have lent himself to this process--to the pinning down of the excellent spirit of Christ (who by the way was man enough to drive the money-changers out of the Temple) to a mere formula, as one might pin a dragon-fly to a labelled card--_Thou shalt not use Violence: thou shalt not Resist!_ And all the while to cleave to a formula only means to admit the evil in some other shape which the formula does not meet--to forswear the stick only means to resort to rebuke and sarcasm in self-defence, which may inflict more pain and a deeper scar, and in some cases more injury, than the stick; or if self-defence in any shape is quite forsworn then that only means to resign and abandon one's place in the world completely. And the same of the somewhat spooney Altruism, which was at one time much recommended as the maxim of conduct. For all the while it is notorious that the specially altruistic people are as a rule painfully dull and uninteresting, and afford far less life and charm to those around them than many who are frankly egotistic; and so by following a formula of Altruism it seems they wreck the very work they set before themselves to do--namely, that of making the world brighter!