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By Root 614 0

for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Whatever man did to man, he should himself be made to suffer by way of punishment. If he killed another, the law would kill him. If he put out another man’s eye, his own was put out by the officers of justice. To whatever extent he maimed or wounded another, he himself would be made to suffer too; and this code was better than none, and perhaps not bad as a beginning. For barbarous people, unable to appreciate the abstract idea of justice, unable to look forward beyond the passion of the moment, without imagination to realize an unobvious penalty, this did, no doubt, in most cases furnish an effective check upon primitive instinct. Then, as time went on, and barbarism gradually passed into a settled civilization, this primitive code was slowly modified by public opinion into something at least less obviously brutal.

This was the case as far as public justice was concerned. In private life, however, the ancient code continued to hold sway in men’s hearts and minds, even though they no longer perpetrated actual deeds of violence; and it is not exaggerating to say that it has continued to hold sway down to the present hour. The desire to “get even,” to get one’s own back, to level things up somehow or other, when we have been hurt or have suffered injustice, or witnessed things of which we did not approve, is still with us all—and will remain with us until the time when we definitely take ourselves in hand and destroy it. “Revenge,” said Bacon, “is a kind of wild justice,” and the natural man with the natural thirst for justice (for true justice is a part of the Divine Harmony, and all men at every stage seem always to have some intuitive conception of the Divine Spiritual Harmony that lies behind appearances) feels that the proper way to restore a balance is the obvious one of paying back the delinquent in his own coin.

But this is precisely the deadly fallacy that lies at the root of all the strife, public and private, in the world. It is the direct cause of international wars, of family feuds and personal quarrels, and, as we shall learn in the study of Scientific Christianity, it is the cause of much, if not most, of our ill health and our other difficulties. Now Jesus reverses this and says that when someone injures you, instead of seeking to get your own back or to repay him in his own coin, you are to do the very opposite—you are to forgive him, and set him free. No matter what the provocation may be, and no matter how many times it is repeated, you are to do this. You are to loose him and let him go, for thus only can you be freed yourself—thus only can you possess your own soul. To return evil for evil, to answer violence with violence and hate with hate, is to start a vicious circle to which there is no ending but the wearing out of your own life and your brother’s too.

“Hatred ceases not with hatred,” said the Light of Asia, enunciating this great Cosmic. Truth many centuries before, and the Light of the World put it in the forefront of his teaching because it is the cornerstone of man’s salvation.

This doctrine of “resist not evil” is the great metaphysical secret. To the world—those who do not understand—it sounds like moral suicide, the feeblest surrender to aggression: but in the light of the Jesus Christ revelation it is seen to be superb spiritual strategy. Antagonize any situation, and you give it power against yourself; offer mental nonresistance, and it crumbles away in front of you.

Jesus, as we have seen, is the Master Metaphysician, concerning himself only with states of consciousness, with the thoughts and beliefs that men accept for these are the things that matter, the things that are causative. He gives no instructions for details of external conduct, and so the references here to suing at law, to coat and cloak, to lending and borrowing, to turning the other cheek, are illustrative and symbolical of mental states, and are not to be taken in the narrow literal sense. This statement is not in any way an endeavor to evade or gloss over a difficult text. We cannot