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He asked me what he should do to know God, how he was to get free. “Can you tell a lie ?” I asked him. “No,” he replied. “Then you must learn to do so. It is better to tell a lie than to be a brute, or a log of wood; you are inactive; you are not certainly of the highest state, which is beyond all actions, calm and serene; you are too dull even to do something wicked.” That was an . extreme case, of course, and I was in joke with him ; but what I meant was, that a man must be active, in order to pass through activity to perfect calmness.
Inactivity should be avoided by all means. Activity always means resistance. Resist all evils, mental and physical; and when you have şucceeded in resisting, then will calmness comę. It is very easy to say. “Hate not anybody, resist not any evil," but we know what that kind of thing generally means in practice. When the eyes of society are turned towards us we may make a show of non-resistance, but in our hearts it is canker all the time. We feel the utter want of the
