[1] It is the culmination of 30 years of Tolstoy's thinking and lays out a new organization for society based on an interpretation of Christianity focusing on universal love.

In reading Jesus' words in the Gospels, Tolstoy notes that the modern church is a heretical creation: Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church.Tolstoy presented excerpts from magazines and newspapers relating various personal experiences, and gave keen insight into the history of non-resistance from the very foundation of Christianity, as being professed by a minority of believers.

In particular, he confronts those who seek to maintain status quo: That this social order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and wars is necessary to society; that still greater disaster would ensue if this organization were destroyed; all this is said only by those who profit by this organization, while those who suffer from it – and they are ten times as numerous – think and say quite the contrary.In 1894, Constance Garnett, who translated the work into English, wrote the following in her translator's preface: One cannot of course anticipate that English people, slow as they are to be influenced by ideas, and instinctively distrustful of all that is logical, will take a leap in the dark and attempt to put Tolstoy's theory of life into practice.

[3]Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth (Part II, Chapter 15) that Tolstoy's book "overwhelmed" him, and "left an abiding impression".

Gandhi listed Tolstoy's book, as well as John Ruskin's Unto This Last and the poet Shrimad Rajchandra (Raychandbhai), as the three most important modern influences in his life.

In 1908, Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu,[5] which Gandhi would read, and which outlined the notion that only by using love as a weapon through passive resistance could the native Indian people overthrow the colonial British Empire.