The Kingdom of God Is Within You | Page 9

cruel punishment

would be abolished, and violence and feud would be replaced by peace
and love. Even if there were only a small minority of them, they would
rarely experience anything worse than the world's contempt, and
meantime the world, though unconscious of it, and not grateful for it,
would be continually becoming wiser and better for their unseen action
on it. And if in the worst case some members of the minority were
persecuted to death, in dying for the truth they would have left behind
them their doctrine, sanctified by the blood of their martyrdom. Peace,
then, to all who seek peace, and may overruling love be the
imperishable heritage of every soul who obeys willingly Christ's word,
"Resist not evil."
ADIN BALLOU.
For fifty years Ballou wrote and published books dealing principally
with the question of non-resistance to evil by force. In these works,
which are distinguished by the clearness of their thought and eloquence
of exposition, the question is looked at from every possible side, and
the binding nature of this command on every Christian who
acknowledges the Bible as the revelation of God is firmly established.
All the ordinary objections to the doctrine of non-resistance from the
Old and New Testaments are brought forward, such as the expulsion of
the moneychangers from the Temple, and so on, and arguments follow
in disproof of them all. The practical reasonableness of this rule of
conduct is shown independently of Scripture, and all the objections
ordinarily made against its practicability are stated and refuted. Thus
one chapter in a book of his treats of non-resistance in exceptional
cases, and he owns in this connection that if there were cases in which
the rule of non-resistance were impossible of application, it would
prove that the law was not universally authoritative. Quoting these
cases, he shows that it is precisely in them that the application of the
rule is both necessary and reasonable. There is no aspect of the question,
either on his side or on his opponents', which he has not followed up in
his writings. I mention all this to show the unmistakable interest which
such works ought to have for men who make a profession of
Christianity, and because one would have thought Ballou's work would
have been well known, and the ideas expressed by him would lave been

either accepted or refuted; but such has not been the case.
The work of Garrison, the father, in his foundation of the Society of
Non-resistants and his Declaration, even more than my correspondence
with the Quakers, convinced me of the fact that the departure of the
ruling form of Christianity from the law of Christ on non-resistance by
force is an error that has long been observed and pointed out, and that
men have labored, and are still laboring, to correct. Ballou's work
confirmed me still more in this view. But the fate of Garrison, still
more that of Ballou, in being completely unrecognized in spite of fifty
years of obstinate and persistent work in the same direction, confirmed
me in the idea that there exists a kind of tacit but steadfast conspiracy
of silence about all such efforts.
Ballou died in August, 1890, and there was as obituary notice of him in
an American journal of Christian views (RELIGIO-
PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNAL, August 23). In this laudatory notice it
is recorded that Ballou was the spiritual director of a parish, that he
delivered from eight to nine thousand sermons, married one thousand
couples, and wrote about five hundred articles; but there is not a single
word said of the object to which he devoted his life; even the word
"non-resistance" is not mentioned. Precisely as it was with all the
preaching of the Quakers for two hundred years and, too, with the
efforts of Garrison the father, the foundation of his society and journal,
and his Declaration, so it is with the life-work of Ballou. It seems just
as though it did not exist and never had existed.
We have an astounding example of the obscurity of works which aim at
expounding the doctrine of non-resistance to evil by force, and at
confuting those who do not recognize this commandment, in the book
of the Tsech Helchitsky, which has only lately been noticed and has not
hitherto been printed.
Soon after the appearance of my book in German, I received a letter
from Prague, from a professor of the university there, informing me of
the existence of a work, never yet printed, by Helchitsky, a Tsech of the
fifteenth century, entitled "The Net of Faith." In this work, the
professor told me, Helchitsky expressed precisely the same view as to

true and false Christianity as I had expressed in my book "What I
Believe." The professor wrote to me that Helchitsky's