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in his favour — but I cannot but take exception to the terms in which you praise him, the whole burthen of which is that he never questions but always obeys. This is the Jesuit organization over again. And this renunciation of private judgment, this abnegation of one's own personal responsibility, this accepting the dictates of outside voices as a substitute for one's own conscience, is to my mind a sin of no ordinary magnitude & involves a principle inimical to all true civilization. Moreover I venture to predict that such system of passive obedience will never obtain the cooperation of the highest minds in any society. Nay further I feel bound to say that if as I seem to gather from many incidental passages in our letters, this doctrine of blind obedience is an essential one in your system, I greatly doubt whether any spiritual light it may confer can compensate mankind for the loss of that private freedom of action, that sense of personal, individual responsibility of which it would deprive them. Nay further I take, unless I wholly misread the teachings of history and the spirit of the age, any organization, which has for the key note passive obedience is itself doomed.

Now for the first time I begin to get a glimpse of what you probably mean by what you so often allude to as the irreconcilable nature of Eastern and Western Ideas. Truly despotism is of the East[;] Freedom of the West. But I confess that I have hitherto been unable to conceive the possibility of a brotherhood like yours accepting as a tenet the principle that underlies all despotisms. Yet when your highest praise is bestowed, not on someone who wisely & cleverly works out a good end but on one who amidst the inescapable errors "always obeys and never questions" what else can I conclude?