happened if this had not been I cannot know. And what an immense
mass of evil must result, and indeed does result, from allowing
men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen. Ninety-
nine per cent of the evil of the world is founded on this
reasoning--from the Inquisition to dynamite bombs, and the
executions or punishments of tens of thousands of political
criminals.

A fourth, still more refined, reply to the question, What ought to
be the Christian's attitude to Christ's command of non-resistance
to evil by force? consists in declaring that they do not deny the
command of non-resisting evil, but recognize it; but they only do
not ascribe to this command the special exclusive value attached
to it by sectarians. To regard this command as the indispensable
condition of Christian life, as Garrison, Ballou, Dymond, the
Quakers, the Mennonites and the Shakers do now, and as the
Moravian brothers, the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Bogomilites,
and the Paulicians did in the past, is a one-sided heresy. This
command has neither more nor less value than all the other
commands, and the man who through weakness transgresses any
command whatever, the command of non-resistance included, does not
cease to be a Christian if he hold the true faith. This is a very
skillful device, and many people who wish to be deceived are
easily deceived by it. The device consists in reducing a direct
conscious denial of a command to a casual breach of it. But one
need only compare the attitude of the teachers of the Church to
this and to other commands which they really do recognize, to be
convinced that their attitude to this is completely different from
their attitude to other duties.