The Tao Teh King: A Short Study in Comparative Religion: Chapter LXVIII

The Tao Teh King: A Short Study in Comparative Religion, by C. Spurgeon Medhurst, [1905], at sacred-texts.com

CHAPTER LXVIII.

The most skillful warriors are not war-like; the best fighters are not wrathful; the mightiest conquerors never strive; the greatest masters are ever lowly.

This is the glory of non-strife; and the might of utilization; these equal heaven, they were the goal of the ancients.

Desire for self-assertion is the controlling motive on the material plane—dogma contends with dogma, creed with creed, Church with Church. On the spiritual plane the sense of separateness which produces contention disappears and as the material is controlled by the moral, the physical by the spiritual, it follows that, centuries of contrary conceptions notwithstanding, the greatest might is that which does not contend. An anonymous writer has well said:

"Force and evil are no remedy. Use those means, and we shall find we only move the trouble from one quarter into another, and the difficulty we apparently get out of in one direction has come home to roost in another, stronger than ever. Goodness, and Goodness only, will destroy evil, and make our lives in this world—and in the next—smooth and comfortable." *

CHAPTER LXVIII.

Footnotes