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[William Brenner Stover (1866-1930), a missionary of the Church of the Brethren in Gujarat, India, until 1920, wrote to Gandhiji on May 2, 1927:
"You are working for the larger good; you have taken the Lord Christ for your Leader and Guide...
"I suggest that instead of the charkha every day, you set the example and put the challenge to all of educated India, to choose out someone of illiterate India, and spend a half hour a day in teaching this illiterate person. I would also suggest that the teacher and the one taught be of different castes. This idea carried to any great
extent throughout the land would bring about almost a revolution in the thinking of the people..."
He continued: "Japan has attained the highest literacy. Would India take a suggestion from Japan? It would be educate, I think."158]
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Ashram, Sabarmati,
June 16, 1927
Dear friend,
I thank you for your letter. Your suggestion is undoubtedly interesting. But I do not understand
why you fall foul of the charkha which the millions can easily take up; whereas your suggestion requires technical knowledge and character at its back. Your friends of the West have made a god of literacy. I wonder what Jesus, whom you call the "Lord Christ", would say if he came in flesh and saw the people of the
West crazy over a knowledge of letters, wealth and passing the best part of their time and life in seeking happiness from the external. Supposing that every person of education gave mechanically half an hour to teaching every untouchable, of what avail will it be to him or to the untouchables? And why are you so much enamoured of the material progress of Japan? I do not know whether the material has gone side by side with the moral progress. I have no wish to judge the Japanese. I have not even the data for doing so even if I wished. But neither literacy nor wealth without the moral backing has any attraction for me. And do you know why I swear by the
charkha? I do so because not merely the untouchables but millions of other people in
India are starving because they have no work and because now they have even become too lazy to work. I am therefore presenting the charkha to the starving
millions as there is no other simple productive work which can be presented to the millions; and I present it to the educated and the well-to-do people of India as an example for the rest.
I have the highest regard for my missionary friends, and that very regard makes me warn them in season and out of season against misinterpreting the
message of the Bible. You tell me, "you have taken the Lord Christ for your leader and guide. There is none better." You do not mind my correcting you. I regard Jesus as a human being like the rest of the teachers of the world. As such He was undoubtedly great. But I do not by any means regard him to have been the very best. The acknowledgment of the debt which I have so often repeated that I owe to the Sermon on the Mount should not be mistaken to mean an acknowledgment of the
orthodox interpretation of the Bible, or the life of Jesus. I must not sail under false
colours.
Your letter is sincere and I felt that I could not better reciprocate your sincerity than by putting before you frankly my position.
Yours sincerely,
M.K. Gandhi
W.B. Stover, Esq.
Mount Morris, Illinois
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