I have recalled all these sayings and acts of Christ almost at random. They seem to me to be equivalent one to another as a thousand is equivalent to a thousand. They are all messages sent out by the same man in the same state of feeling. If he had lived longer, there would have been more of them. If you should summarize them all into a philosophy and then reduce that philosophy to a phrase, you would have another dogma. The reason I called this lecture Non-resistance instead of using some more general religious title, is that I happened to be led into re-examining the meaning of Christ’s sayings through his phrase “Resist not evil; but overcome evil with good.” It came about in the course of many struggles over practical reforms. I had not the smallest religious or theoretical bias in entering the field of politics. Here were certain actual cruelties, injurious things done by particular men, in plain sight. They ought to be stopped. The question is how to do it. First you go to the wrongdoers and beg them to stop, and they will not stop. Then to the officials in authority over them, with the same result. “Remove these officials” is now your conclusion, and you go and join the party that keeps them in power; for you intend to induce that party to change them. You now engage in infinitely long, exhausting struggles with the elements of wickedness, which seem to be the real cause and support of those injuries which you are trying to stop. You make no headway; you find you are wasting force; you are fighting at a disadvantage; all your energies are exhausted in antagonism. It occurs to you to join the other party, and induce that party to advocate a positive good, whereby the people may be appealed to and the iniquities voted down. But your trouble here begins afresh, for it seems as hard to induce the “outs” to make a square attack on the evil as it is to get the “ins” to desist from doing the evil. Your struggle, your antagonism, your waste of energy continues. At last you leave the outs and form a new party, a reform party of your own. Merciful heavens! neither will this new party attack wickedness. Your mind, your thought, your time is still taken up in resisting the influences which your old enemies are bringing to bear upon your new friends. I had got as far as this in the experience and had come to see plainly that there was somewhere a mistake in my method. It was a mistake to try to induce others to act. The thing to do was to act myself, alone and directly, without waiting for help. I should thus at least be able to do what I knew to be right; and perhaps this was the strongest appeal I could make to anyone. The thing to do was to run independent candidates and ask the public to support good men. Then there occurred to me the phrase, “Resist not evil,” and the phrase seemed to explain the experience.