“This was on a Saturday; and when I went home from the coal‐pit my wife saw my face was swollen, and asked what was the matter with it. I said: ‘I’ve been fighting, and I’ve given a man a good thrashing.’ “She burst out weeping, and said, ‘O Richard, what made you fight?’ Then I told her all about it; and she thanked the Lord I had not struck back. “But the Lord had struck, and his blows have more effect than man’s. Monday came. The devil began to tempt me, saying: ‘The other men will laugh at thee for allowing Tom to treat thee as he did on Saturday.’ I cried, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan;’—and went on my way to the coal‐pit. “Tom was the first man I saw. I said ‘Good‐morning,’ but got no reply. “He went down first. When I got down, I was surprised to see him sitting on the wagon‐road waiting for me. When I came to him he burst into tears and said: ‘Richard, will you forgive me for striking you?’ “ ‘I have forgiven thee,’ said I; ‘ask God to forgive thee. The Lord bless thee.’ I gave him my hand, and we went each to his work.”(166) “Love your enemies!” Mark you, not simply those who happen not to be your friends, but your _enemies_, your positive and active enemies. Either this is a mere Oriental hyperbole, a bit of verbal extravagance, meaning only that we should, as far as we can, abate our animosities, or else it is sincere and literal. Outside of certain cases of intimate individual relation, it seldom has been taken literally. Yet it makes one ask the question: Can there in general be a level of emotion so unifying, so obliterative of differences between man and man, that even enmity may come to be an irrelevant circumstance and fail to inhibit the friendlier interests aroused? If positive well‐wishing could attain so supreme a degree of excitement, those who were swayed by it might well seem superhuman beings. Their life would be morally discrete from the life of other men, and there is no saying, in the absence of positive experience of an authentic kind,—for there are few active examples in our scriptures, and the Buddhistic examples are legendary,(167)—what the effects might be: they might conceivably transform the world. Psychologically and in principle, the precept “Love your enemies” is not self‐contradictory. It is merely the extreme limit of a kind of magnanimity with which, in the shape of pitying tolerance of our oppressors, we are fairly familiar. Yet if radically followed, it would involve such a breach with our instinctive springs of action as a whole, and with the present world’s arrangements, that a critical point would practically be passed, and we should be born into another kingdom of being. Religious emotion makes us feel that other kingdom to be close at hand, within our reach.