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,[168]--what
the effects might be: they might conceivably transform the
world.
[168] As where the future Buddha, incarnated as a hare, jumps
into the fire to cook himself for a meal for a beggar--having
previously shaken himself three times, so that none of the
insects in his fur should perish with him.
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.
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