THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE.[D]
A DOGMA is a phrase that condenses much thought. It is a short way of stating a great truth, and is supposed to recall that truth to the mind. Like a talisman it is to be repeated. Open sesame—and some great mystery of life is unlocked.
A dogma is like a key to a map, a thread to a labyrinth. It is all that some man has brought back from a spiritual exaltation in which he has had a vision of how the world is made; and he repeats it and teaches it as a digest of his vision, a short and handy summary and elixir by which he, and as he thinks anyone else, can go back into his exaltation and see the truth. To him the words seem universally true—true at all times and in any aspect. Indeed, all experience, all thought, all conduct seem to him to be made up of mere illustrations, proofs, and reminiscences of the dogma.
It is probable that all the dogmas were originally shots at the same truth, nets cast over the same truth, digests of the same vision. There is no other way of accounting for their power. If the doctrine of the Trinity signified no more than what I can see in it, it would never have been regarded as important. Unless the words “Salvation by Grace” had at one time stood for the most powerful conviction of the most holy minds, we should never have heard the phrase. Our nearest way to come at the meaning of such things is to guess that the dogmas are the dress our own thought might have worn, had we lived in times when they arose. We must translate our best selves back into the past in order to understand the phrases.
Of course, these dogmas, like our own dogmas, are no sooner uttered than they change. Somebody traduces them, or expounds them, or founds a sect or a prosecution upon them. Then comes a new vision and a new digest. And so the controversy goes rolling down through the centuries, changing its forms but not its substance. And it has rolled down to us, and we are asking the question, “What is truth?” as eagerly, as sincerely, and as patiently as we may.
Truth is a state of mind. All of us have known it and have known the loss of it. We enter it unconsciously; we pass out of it before we are aware. It comes and goes like a searchlight from an unknown source. At one moment we see all things clearly, at the next we are fighting a fog. At one moment we are as weak as rags, at the next we are in contact with some explaining power that courses through us, making us feel like electrical conductors, or the agents of universal will. In the language of Christ these latter feelings are moments of “faith”; and faith is one of the very few words which he used a great many times in just the same sense, as a name for a certain kind of experience. He did not define the word, but he seems to have given it a specific meaning.
The state of mind in which Christ lived is the truth he taught. How he reached that state of mind we do not know; how he maintained it, and what it is, he spent the last two years of his life in expressing. Whatever he was saying or doing, he was always conveying the same truth—the whole of it. It was never twice alike and yet it was always the same; even when he spoke very few words, as to Pilate “Thou sayest it,” or to Peter “Feed my sheep”; or when he said nothing, but wrote on the ground. He not only expressed this truth because he could not help expressing it, but because he wished and strove to express it. His teaching, his parables, his sayings showed that he spared no pains to think of illustrations and suggestions; he used every device of speech to make his thought carry.
Take his directest words: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; “Love your enemies.” One might call these things descriptions of his own state of mind. Or take his philosophical remarks. They are not merely statements as to what truth is; but hints as to how it must be sought, how the state of mind can be entered into and in what it consists. “Whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it.” “That which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.” Or more prosaically still. “If any man shall do his will, he shall know of the doctrine.” To this class belongs the expression “Resist not evil.”
The parables are little anecdotes which serve to remind the hearer of his own moments of tenderness and self-sacrifice. The Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Repentant Sinner, are illustrations of Christ’s way of feeling toward human nature. They are less powerful than his words and acts, because no constructed thing has the power of a real thing. The reply of the Greek woman who besought Christ to cure her daughter, “Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs,” is one of the most affecting things in the New Testament. It is more powerful than the tale of the Prodigal Son. But you will see that if the Prodigal’s father had been a real father, and the Greek mother had been a personage in a parable, the power would have been the other way.
And so it is that Christ’s most powerful means of conveying his thought was neither by his preaching nor by his parables; but by what he himself said and did incidentally. This expressed his doctrine because his state of feeling was his doctrine. The things Christ did by himself and the words he said to himself, these things are Christianity—his washing the disciples’ feet, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,” his crucifixion.
I have recalled all these sayings and acts of Christ almost at random. They seem to me to be equivalent one to another as a thousand is equivalent to a thousand. They are all messages sent out by the same man in the same state of feeling. If he had lived longer, there would have been more of them. If you should summarize them all into a philosophy and then reduce that philosophy to a phrase, you would have another dogma.
The reason I called this lecture Non-resistance instead of using some more general religious title, is that I happened to be led into re-examining the meaning of Christ’s sayings through his phrase “Resist not evil; but overcome evil with good.” It came about in the course of many struggles over practical reforms. I had not the smallest religious or theoretical bias in entering the field of politics. Here were certain actual cruelties, injurious things done by particular men, in plain sight. They ought to be stopped.
The question is how to do it. First you go to the wrongdoers and beg them to stop, and they will not stop. Then to the officials in authority over them, with the same result. “Remove these officials” is now your conclusion, and you go and join the party that keeps them in power; for you intend to induce that party to change them. You now engage in infinitely long, exhausting struggles with the elements of wickedness, which seem to be the real cause and support of those injuries which you are trying to stop. You make no headway; you find you are wasting force; you are fighting at a disadvantage; all your energies are exhausted in antagonism. It occurs to you to join the other party, and induce that party to advocate a positive good, whereby the people may be appealed to and the iniquities voted down. But your trouble here begins afresh, for it seems as hard to induce the “outs” to make a square attack on the evil as it is to get the “ins” to desist from doing the evil. Your struggle, your antagonism, your waste of energy continues. At last you leave the outs and form a new party, a reform party of your own. Merciful heavens! neither will this new party attack wickedness. Your mind, your thought, your time is still taken up in resisting the influences which your old enemies are bringing to bear upon your new friends.
I had got as far as this in the experience and had come to see plainly that there was somewhere a mistake in my method. It was a mistake to try to induce others to act. The thing to do was to act myself, alone and directly, without waiting for help. I should thus at least be able to do what I knew to be right; and perhaps this was the strongest appeal I could make to anyone. The thing to do was to run independent candidates and ask the public to support good men. Then there occurred to me the phrase, “Resist not evil,” and the phrase seemed to explain the experience.
What had I been doing all these years but wrangling over evil? I had a system that pitted me in a ring against certain agencies of corruption and led to unending antagonism. The phrase not only explained what was wrong with the whole system, but what was wrong with every human contact that occurred under it. The more you thought of it, the truer it seemed. It was not merely true of politics, it was true of all human intercourse. The politics of New York bore the same sort of relation to this truth that a kodak does to the laws of optics. Our politics were a mere illustration of it. The phrase seemed to explain everything either wrong or mistaken that I had ever done in my life. To meet selfishness with selfishness, anger with anger, irritation with irritation, that was the harm. But the saying was not exhausted yet. The phrase passed over into physiology and showed how to cure a cramp in a muscle or stop a headache. It was true as religion, true as pathology, and true as to everything between them. I felt as a modern mathematician might feel, who should find inscribed in an Egyptian temple a mathematical formula which not only included all he knew, but showed that all he knew was a mere stumbling comment on the ancient science.
What mind was it that walked the earth and put the sum of wisdom into three words? By what process was it done? The impersonal precision and calm of the statement give it the quality of geometry, and yet it expresses nothing but human feeling. I suppose that Christ arrived at the remark by simple introspection. The impulse which he felt in himself to oppose evil with evil—he puts his finger on that impulse as the crucial danger. There is in the phrase an extreme care, as if he were explaining a mechanism. He seems to be saying “If you wish to open the door, you must lift the latch before you pull the handle. If you wish to do good, you must resist evil with good, not with evil.”
It is the same with his other sayings. They are almost dry, they are so accurate. “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart”; the analysis of emotion could hardly be carried farther. “How hard it is for them that trust in riches to enter into the Kingdom of God”; here is neither exaggeration nor epigram. “Thy faith hath made thee whole”; a statement of fact. “Knock and it shall be opened unto you”; this is the summary of Christ’s whole life down to the time his teaching began. He had knocked and it had been opened to him. He had wished to make men better, and inasmuch as he wished it harder than anyone else before or since has wished it, he got farther than anyone toward an understanding of how to do it. The effectiveness of his thought has been due to its coherence. He was able to draw the sky together over any subject till all the light fell on one point. Then he said what he saw. Every question was shown to break up into the same crystals if subjected to the same pressure. Nor does his influence upon the world present any anomaly. It is entirely due to ordinary causes. Every man’s influence depends upon the depth of his will; for this determines his power of concentration. The controlled force that could contract Christ’s own mind to so small a focus, brings down to the same focus other minds of less coherence than his. This is will; this is leadership; this is power.
Yet in spite of his will there were plenty of things that Christ himself could not do, as, for instance, change the world at once, or change it at all except through the slow process of personal influence. He could not heal people who had no faith, or get followers except by going into the highways and hedges after them. And his whole life is as valuable in showing what cannot be done, as in showing what can be done. If you love your fellow-men and wish to benefit them, you will find that the ways in which it is possible to do this are not many. You can do harm in many ways, good only in one.
The world is full of people who want to do good, and men are constantly re-discovering Christ. This intelligence, superior to our own, possesses and utilizes us. There is always more danger of his influence being perverted than of its dying out; for as men begin to discover the scope and horizon of his thought they are tempted to becloud it with commentary. They wish to say what he meant, whereas he has said it himself. We think to explain something whose value is that it explains us. If we understood him, very likely we should say nothing.
The mistake Christians make is that they strive to follow Christ as a gnat follows a candle. No man ought to follow Christ in this way. A man ought to follow truth, and when he does this, he will find that, as he gropes his way through life, most of the light that falls on the path in front of him, and moves as he moves, comes from the mind of Christ. But if one is to learn from that mind one must take it as a lens through which to view truth; not as truth itself. We do not look at a lens, but through it.
There are moments in each of our lives when all the things that Christ said seem clear, sensible, relevant. The use of his sayings is to remind us of these moments and carry us back into them. The danger of his sayings is lest we rely upon them as final truth. They are no more truth than the chemical equivalents for food are food, or than certain symbols of dynamics are the power of Niagara. At those moments when the real Niagara is upon us we must keep our minds bent on how to do good to our fellow-men; not the partial good of material benevolence, but the highest good we know. The thoughts and habits we thus form and work out, painfully plotting over them, revising, renewing, remodeling them, become our personal church. This is our own religion, this is our clue to truth, this is the avenue through which we may pass back to truth and possess it. No other cord will hold except the one a man has woven himself. No other key will serve except the one a man has forged himself.
Christ was able to hold a prism perfectly still in his hand so as to dissolve a ray of light into its elements. Every time he speaks, he splits open humanity, as a man might crack a nut and show the kernel. The force of human feeling behind these sayings can be measured only by their accomplishments. They have been re-arranging and overturning human society ever since. By this most unlikely means of quiet demonstration in word and deed, did he unlock this gigantic power. The bare fragments of his talk open the sluices of our minds; they overwhelm and re-create. That was his method. The truth which he conveyed with such metaphysical accuracy lives now in the living. Very likely we cannot express it in dogmas, for such intellect as it takes to utter a dogma is not in us. But we need have no fear for our power of expressing it. It is enough for us to see truth; for if we see it, everything we do will express it.