The doctrine of non-resistance to evil does not rest upon the words of Christ alone. Buddha, Confucius, Plato, Socrates, show the evil and destruction of war, of conquest, of violence, and of hatred, and have taught the beneficence of peace, of forgiveness, of non-resistance to evil. But modern thought is not content to rest the conduct of life upon the theories of moralists. The rules of life that govern men and states must to-day be in keeping with science and conform to the highest reason and judgment of man. It is here that non-resistance seems to have failed to make any practical progress in the world. That men should “turn the other cheek,” should “love their enemies,” should “resist not evil,” has ever seemed fine to teach to children, to preach on Sundays, to round a period in a senseless oratorical flight; but it has been taken for granted that these sentiments cannot furnish the real foundation for strong characters or great states. It is idle to discuss “non-resistance” in its effect upon life and the world without adopting some standard of excellence by which to judge results. Here, as elsewhere in human conduct, after all is said and done, men must come back to the fundamental principle that the conduct which makes for life is wise and right. Nature in her tireless labor has ever been developing a higher order and a completer life. Sometimes for long periods it seems as if the world were on the backward course, but even this would prove that life really is the highest end to be attained. Whatever tends to happiness tends to life,—joy is life and misery is death. In his long and toilsome pilgrimage, man has come to his present estate through endless struggle, through brutal violence administered and received. And the question of the correctness of non-resistance as a theory, like any other theory, does not depend upon whether it can be enforced and lived now or to-morrow, but whether it is the highest ideal of life that is given us to conceive. In one sense nothing is practical excepting what is; everything must have been developed out of all the conditions of life that now exist or have existed on the earth. But to state this means little in the settlement of ethical questions, for man’s future condition depends quite as much upon his mental attitude as upon any other fact that shapes his course.