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Practice of Non-Violence
beings, but chiefly physical. Nor is it physical non-resistance to all human being, under all circumstances, but only so far as to abstain totally from the infliction of personal injury, as a means of resistance. It is simply non-resistance of injury with injury-evil with evil.
“Non-resistance alone makes it possible to tear out evil by the root, both out of our own hearts and those of our neighbours. The teaching forbids the doing of that by which evil is multiplied in the world. He who attacks another and insults him engenders in him the sentiment of hatred, the root of all evil. To offend another because he has offended us, on the specious pretext of removing an evil, is really to repeat an evil deed, both against him and against ourselves to beget, or at least to free and to encourage, the very demon we wish to expel. Satan cannot be driven out by Satan, untruth cannot be cleaned by untruth, and evil cannot be vanquished by evil.
“True non-resistance is the one true resistance to evil. It crushes the serpent's head; it kills and finally destroys the evil sentiment.
"Non-resistance is as practicable as any good prescribed by the Law of God. The good cannot under all circumstances be executed without self-renunciation, privation, suffering, and in extreme cases the loss of life itself. But he who values life more than the fulfilment of God's will, is already dead to the one true life. Such a man, in trying to save his life, shall lose it. And in general, where non-resistance demands the sacrifice of one life, or the sacrifice of some essential good of life, resistance demands thousands of such sacrifices.
"Non-resistance preserves; resistance destroys. It is incomparably safer to act justly than to act unjustly; to bear an insult than to resist it by violence. It is safer even in relation to the present life. If no man resisted evil with evil, our world would bejblessed.
"If only one man acted thus, (non-resistantly) and all the others agreed to crucify him, would it not be more glorious for him to die in the triumph of non-resisting love, paying for his enemies, than to live wearing the crown of Caesar, bespattered with the blood of the slain? But one man or a thousand who have firmly determined not to resist evil with evil---whether among enlightened people or savage neighbours--are much safer
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