"'RESIST not evil,' means never resist, never oppose violence." Such is the motto, quoted from Tolstoy, with which our propagandist heads his pages. As he cites no other scholar, critic, or interpreter of the Sermon on the Mount, in support of this declaration of the meaning, the inference is perhaps allowable that the reader is expected to endow Tolstoy with a credit for scientific attainments in the difficult field of historical criticism and interpretation equally great with that which all men gladly accord to his noble disposition and sincere humanity. Whether authority as convincing can be cited for the contention that Buddha and Lao-tse taught the same doctrine of absolute non-resistance we are not competent to say. It seems at least to be beautifully expressed in the saying quoted from Buddha: With mercy and forbearance shalt thou disarm every foe. For want of fuel the fire expires: mercy and forbearance bring violence to naught. What Christian will deny the Christ-likeness of this teaching? What reader of the Old Testament will not hasten to add with Paul from Jewish "wisdom": If thine enemy hunger feed him, if he thirst give him drink; for by so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire upon his head.[1] If, indeed, the duty in question be that of _forbearance_, all great religious teachers, whether of Christian or pre-Christian times, will be at one. "Hymns of hate" are unknown to the ritual of any religion, unless it be the ultra-modern of Prussian militarism. One must go to Nietzsche before attaining to the gospel that it is virtuous to have a giant's strength and use it like a giant. Teachers such as Buddha and Lao-tse may well have added to the well-nigh universal religious tenet of mercy, forgiveness, forbearance, the further doctrine of consistent, unqualified non-resistance. We accept it for the obvious reason that their systems of thought, which are philosophies rather than religions, contain (so far as the present writer is aware) no principle of active, but only of passive obligation. The chief end of man is for them not to achieve, in loyal service to the Creator's ideal, but to abstain and refrain, to put the brakes on life, and to teach others to do the like. According to the author of "New Wars for Old," Buddha and Lao-tse lived up to their gospel of non-resistance. Contrariwise, "The Nazarene had his inconsistent moments like the rest of us," and showed it at this point. Our propagandist is too honest to palter with the quibble of Adin Ballou, who in his "Christian Non-Resistance" argues that Jesus in cleansing the temple may have driven the money-changers from the courtyard, but that there is no evidence that he struck any one of them. With such apologetic special pleading he has no patience, preferring to give the act of Jesus its full weight in the following straightforward words: