What had I been doing all these years but wrangling over evil? I had a system that pitted me in a ring against certain agencies of corruption and led to unending antagonism. The phrase not only explained what was wrong with the whole system, but what was wrong with every human contact that occurred under it. The more you thought of it, the truer it seemed. It was not merely true of politics, it was true of all human intercourse. The politics of New York bore the same sort of relation to this truth that a kodak does to the laws of optics. Our politics were a mere illustration of it. The phrase seemed to explain everything either wrong or mistaken that I had ever done in my life. To meet selfishness with selfishness, anger with anger, irritation with irritation, that was the harm. But the saying was not exhausted yet. The phrase passed over into physiology and showed how to cure a cramp in a muscle or stop a headache. It was true as religion, true as pathology, and true as to everything between them. I felt as a modern mathematician might feel, who should find inscribed in an Egyptian temple a mathematical formula which not only included all he knew, but showed that all he knew was a mere stumbling comment on the ancient science. What mind was it that walked the earth and put the sum of wisdom into three words? By what process was it done? The impersonal precision and calm of the statement give it the quality of geometry, and yet it expresses nothing but human feeling. I suppose that Christ arrived at the remark by simple introspection. The impulse which he felt in himself to oppose evil with evil--he puts his finger on that impulse as the crucial danger. There is in the phrase an extreme care, as if he were explaining a mechanism. He seems to be saying “If you wish to open the door, you must lift the latch before you pull the handle. If you wish to do good, you must resist evil with good, not with evil.”