e Sermon on the Mount, from the Christian Bible, was especially influential to him in the development of his philosophy on nonviolence. A passage that profoundly affected Gandhi was one in which Jesus Christ instructed his followers in a method of passive resistance, "But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on they right cheek, turn to him the other also" (Matthew 5:39). The teachings of Christianity helped Gandhi understand the target of India's wrath was not the British themselves but their imperialistic policies. As Gandhi often told his followers, "We need not consider the Englishmen as our enemies . . . I want to convert them and the only way is the way of love" (Green 139).
Nonreligious authors such as Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy likewise influenced Gandhi's philosophy on nonviolence. Gandhi read Thoreau's Civil Disobedience while in prison. Thoreau himself had been jailed for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government whose policies he considered unjust. Tolstoy wrote essays that criticized war and violence, as well as governments and organized religions that failed to follow the principles of truth and justice which they professed to believe. Tolstoy gave up his material possessions in order to live a simple, vegetarian, nonviolent way of life. Gandhi corresponded with Tolstoy until the Russian author's death, and even named one of his ashrams "Tolstoy Farm." Gandhi saw that engagement in social justice could have a transformative power on the human soul: "It was a political fundamental, a universal love that would transcend the distinctions between 'good' and 'bad' people" (Fitzgerald 23).
Because Gandhi believed that spiritual principles were useless unless put into action, he assumed the leadership of the Indian nationalist movement. Before Gandhi joined it, the Indian National Congress (India's party for independence) was an organization that lacked definite goa...