“Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love”

“Little is taught by contest or dispute, everything by sympathy and love” is a principle August Epp quotes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge while the women debate the safety and future of adolescent boys. It gives words to August’s belief that young people can be taught through loving guidance rather than treated as beyond change, and it resonates with the women’s effort to protect their children while acting according to their faith.

The expression and its source

August presents the sentence as the conclusion of Coleridge’s argument in his Lecture on Education. He also recalls Coleridge’s related instruction, “To work by love and so generate love.” Together, the maxims make love both a method of teaching and something that teaching should cultivate; intellectual accuracy, truth, and imaginative power are part of the same educational purpose.

The quotation comes during a discussion of whether boys aged thirteen and fourteen should be allowed to leave with the women. August acknowledges that boys that age can cause harm, including to girls and women and to one another. He describes their impulsiveness and limited understanding of consequences, but insists that they remain children who can be taught. He presents himself as a schoolteacher and believer, and argues for direction, firm love, and patience rather than assuming that the boys’ behavior is fixed.

August’s argument about the boys

The maxim supports a concrete recommendation: the boys should be permitted to leave with the women if the women choose to leave. August does not deny the danger raised in the discussion. Salome and Mejal question why boys aged thirteen and fourteen should be left behind when younger boys can accompany the women, particularly if the accused men return to the colony. August’s answer accepts that adolescents may pose risks while refusing to make that possibility a reason to abandon them to the men’s instruction.

Ona looks up as August speaks and silently mouths the words with him. August connects this moment to his mother, Monica Epp, who had often quoted Coleridge in her secret school. The shared phrase therefore carries a history of teaching beyond the immediate debate: a lesson passed on in a setting for learning that the colony’s ordinary arrangements did not provide openly.

From education to religious practice

The women’s later arguments extend the principle’s concern with how people are taught into a question of how faith is lived. Agata argues that remaining in Molotschna would risk drawing the women into violence and violate the Mennonite commitment to pacifism. Leaving, she says, would protect the women and children while teaching the children to uphold peace, love, and forgiveness even when those values conflict with their fathers’ expectations. In this reasoning, departure is not a rejection of faith but a way to practice it.

Ona likewise argues that forgiveness cannot be genuine if it is compelled. She sees distance from the men as making compassion and forgiveness possible without requiring the women to stay exposed to them. Agata takes up that distinction, describing departure as a means of gaining perspective and fulfilling their religious duties. The Coleridge maxim is not repeated in these arguments, but its contrast between dispute and sympathy illuminates the women’s attempt to choose care and nonviolence over confrontation.

Collective judgment and its limits

The maxim’s emphasis on teaching also bears on who is allowed to interpret religious teaching. Salome points out that the women cannot read the Bible and depend on men to explain what it requires, including the supposed duty of wives to submit to their husbands. Her challenge exposes a difference between instruction that cultivates understanding and authority that demands obedience without giving women access to the text.

Agata describes the women’s decision about their sons as a joint act of maternal care, intellect, and faith: they have considered what is best for the children and intend to act on that judgment. Yet the book also shows the limits of what the departing group can accomplish. Cornelius, who uses a wheelchair, will stay because his mother belongs to the Do Nothing women and he has no choice. Against that uneven outcome, the expression remains an ethical measure rather than a promise of easy transformation: it names the kind of patient, humane teaching August believes is possible, while the women confront the real constraints on protecting every child.