What I Believe

Chapter 4

Now I understood what Christ meant when He said, ‘You have heard that it has been said, “An eye for and eye, and a tooth for a tooth.”  And I say to you, do not resist evil.’  Christ means, ‘You have been taught to consider it right and rational to protect yourselves against evil by violence, to pluck out an eye for and eye, to institute courts of law for the punishment of criminals, and to have a police and an army to defend you against the attacks of an enemy; but I say to you, do no violence to any man, take no part in violence, never do evil to any man, not even to those whom you call your enemies.’

I now understood that, in this doctrine of non-resistance, Christ not only tells us what the natural result of following His doctrine will be, but by placing this same doctrine in opposition to the Mosaic Law, the Roman law, and the various codes of the present time, He clearly shows that it ought to be the basis of our social existence and should deliver us from the evil we have brought on ourselves.  He says, ‘You think to amend evil by your laws, but they only aggravate it.  There is one way by which you can put a stop to evil; it is by indiscriminatingly returning good for evil.  You have tried the other law for thousands of years; now try Mine, which is the very reverse.’  Strange to say, I have had frequent opportunities lately of conversing with men of diverse opinions on this doctrine of non-resistance.  I have met with some who agreed with me, though these have been few.  But there are two orders of men who always refuse to admit, even in principle, a direct understanding of this doctrine, and warmly uphold the justice of resisting evil.  They are men belonging to two extreme poles:  our Christian conservative patriots, who consider their Church as the true orthodox one, and our revolutionary atheists.  Neither the former nor the latter will give up their right to resist by violence what they consider as evil.  Even their cleverest, most learned men close their eyes to the simple, self-evident truth, that if we admit the right of one man to resist what he considers as evil by violence, we cannot refuse another the right to resist by violence what he in his turn may consider as evil.  A short time ago I met with a correspondence particularly instructive as bearing on this very point.  It was carried on between an orthodox Slavophil and a Christian revolutionist.  The former excused the violence of war in the name of his oppressed Slavonian brethren, and the latter vindicated the violence of the revolution in the name of his oppressed brethren, the Russian peasants.  Both admit the necessity for violence, and both ground their reasoning on the doctrine of Christ.

Each of us gives the doctrine of Christ an interpretation of his own, but it is never the direct and simple one that flows out of His words.

We have grounded the conduct of our lives on a principle that He rejects; we do not choose to understand His teaching i…