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III
My hand has sowed love everywhere, giving unto all that will receive. Blessings are offered unto all my children, but many times in their blindness they fail to see them. How few there are who gather the gifts which lie in profusion at their feet; how many there are who, in wilful waywardness, turn their eyes away from them and complain with a wail that they have not that which I have given them! Many of them defiantly repudiate not only my Gifts, but Me also, Me, the Source of all blessings and the Author of their Being.
O, tarry awhile from the turmoil and strife of the world. I will beautify and quicken thy life with love and with joy, for the light of the Soul is love. Where love is there is contentment and peace, and where there is contentment and peace there am I also in their midst.
The aim of the Sinless One consists in acting without causing sorrow to others, although he could attain to great power by ignoring their feelings.
The aim of the Sinless one lies in not doing evil unto those who have done evil unto him.
If a man causes suffering even to those who hate him without any reason, he will ultimately have grief not to be overcome.
The punishment of evil doers consists in making them feel ashamed of themselves by doing them a great kindness.
Of what use is superior knowledge in the one, if he does not endeavour to relieve his neighbour's wants as much as his own?
If, in the morning a man wishes to do evil unto another, in the evening the evil will return to him.
This has taken place everywhere. The fact that love is the highest moral feeling was accepted universally, but the truth itself was interwoven with many and varied falsehoods, which so distorted it, that nothing but mere words remained, out of this recognition of love as the highest moral feeling. The theory was advanced that this highest moral feeling is applicable only to the individual life, that it was good only for home use, – but in social life all forms of violence, prisons, executions, wars, involving acts diametrically opposed to the feeblest sensation of love, were regarded as indispensable for the protection of the majority against evil doers. Notwithstanding that common sense clearly indicates, that if one set of people can arrogate to themselves the right to decide as to which people are to be subjected to all kinds of coercion for the supposed welfare of the many, it naturally follows that those few individuals to whom violence is so applied could also come to the same conclusion with regard to the ruling caste which subjected them to violence: and although the great religious teachers, – Brahmin, Buddhist and especially Christian, – anticipating this perversion of the law of love, directed attention to the one inevitable condition of love: the enduring of affronts, injuries, all kinds of violence without resisting the evil by evil, – mankind continued to accept what was incompatible: the beneficence of love, and with it the resistance of evil by violence, which is and must be opposed to love. And such teachings, in spite of the palpable contradiction which is in them, have taken such a deep hold upon the people, that while believing in the beneficiency of love, people fail to question the lawfulness of an order of life founded on coercion, which includes the imposition not only of tortures but also of death, by some persons upon others.
For a long time people lived in this obvious contradiction without noticing it. But the day came when this contradiction begen to stagger the more thoughtful people of different nations. And the ancient simple truth that it was natural for people to help and to love, instead of torturing and killing each other, began to dawn upon the minds of men and became every day clearer, while the acceptance of those false interpretations by which the deviations from it were justified, became less and less convincing.
In ancient times the chief justification of violence was the theory that so-called monarchs, tsars, sultans, rajahs, shahs, and other heads of states had peculiar and Divine rights. But the longer people lived, the faith in special rights of monarchs sanctioned by God, became weaker and weaker. This faith declined in eqaul degree and almost simultaneously in the Christian, in the Brahman, in the Buddhist and in the Confucian spheres, and it has recently become so feeble that it can no longer serve, as it did before, as a justification of acts openly opposed to common sense and to the true religious feeling. People saw more and more distinctly, and to-day the majority see quite clearly the absurdity and the immorality of the submission of one’s will to that of others like oneself, who require of them actions not only contrary to their material welfare but which are also a violation of their moral feelings. It is, therefore, perfectly natural that people who have lost faith in the supported by religion devinity of the authority of all manner of potentates, should endeavour to free themselves from it. But unfortunately during the domination of those monarchs, considered to be Divinely appointed beings, established themselves near the courts, an ever increasing number of persons, which under the guise of governing the people lived upon their labours. And this governing class took care that as soon as the old religious fraud about divine rule of monarchs should cease to be believed by people another and similar deception should take its place and continue in the same way as the old one to keep nations in slavery to a limited number of rulers.
