Part 9

This needed much explanation. It was all summed up thus: The three in one—the triangle with three sides, which is still one—are: Myself, the other self, which I love and need for my completion, and the love and understanding which pass between us and make us one. Virginia said that she never thought of herself and the other self, that to her they were one. The idea was very new to them all, and did not at once convince them.

“Now,” I said, “we see, however, that opposites are really one; and so I believe that good and bad are parts of the same thing. I believe that everything called bad is the price of going forward, of progress, that bad things are made by good things. Suppose that the world were in utter darkness, that no light were anywhere, then there would be no darkness, either. But the first flame of light would create the darkness.”

As I developed this idea, the children said very little, only asking me questions, until I had finished. This is how I explained it: We all believe—we seven here—that the good is understanding, love, the complete Divine Self, and everything which leads thereto is good. Then everything bad is that which does not lead thereto; or, rather, that is called bad which has not gone so far as the rest. So that the bad is not an actual state—in this I agree with Ruth—but is a condition of good. All pains are growing pains. Things are bad only because we already have something better. The other day I heard Virginia saying that when reason came into the world, creatures first knew the bad; because they saw that the life they had lived was a bad life. So, you see, everything bad is something which we feel to be behind us, not equal to our best knowledge. Pain and badness are the price of progress, and we would rather go forward and suffer than stand still and be comfortable. We long to go forward to the good, to the vast self of complete understanding. “A criminal,” I said, “may be a man who would have been good if he had lived in savage times among savages, but at present he is bad because we are ahead of him.”

“Then a bad man,” said Henry, “is one who is behind his times, or else ahead of them.”

“Oh, no,” they protested, “not ahead of them!”

“No,” I answered, “but the man ahead of his time, who is better than his time, may appear to be a criminal. You must see that the man who believes in the eternal good, who knows that he is going toward unity and complete love, is in a sense above the human law, and must discover his own laws. He may be a criminal in the eyes of others.”

“Give us an example,” they said.

“Jesus is one example. He was crucified as a criminal.”

“Because,” said Henry, “he broke the Roman law. He refused to worship their images, and he called himself King of the Jews.”

“And they did not know,” I answered, “in what sense he called himself King, so they had to crucify him as a traitor. Can’t you think of some other example? Of course, there were all the heretics of old times.”

Alfred and Henry said that Roosevelt was in a sense an example, because he had been much blamed for exposing the truth and hurting business; but that the hurt was an essential part of progress and good.

Ruth said: “Surely it is better to expose the truth and suffer for it, than to go on in falsehood.”

I gave as another example the Russians, with whom, a short time ago, it was a crime to educate the peasants; and I told how brave men and women had been sent to Siberia for breaking the law in this respect.

“But,” I said, “this is a dangerous subject, and truly, we ought not to have mentioned it until we could probe it to the bottom. For surely in a democratic state one of the essential inner laws is that we shall obey the law which our fellows have made.”

“If a law seems wrong to a man,” said Henry, “he can try to change it, but meantime he must obey it. For instance, a man might believe in free trade, but still he would have no right to smuggle in goods.”

“One ought to obey school-laws, I suppose,” said Marian.

“Surely,” I answered, “for the school is an institution you enter from choice, and if you don’t like the laws you can protest by leaving. But if there were a law unjust to your fellows, you would disobey it. Still, even then, the best way to protest would be by a strike of the students.”

They had a long discussion on the great crime of whispering in school, in which I scarcely joined, as I refuse to be a petty preacher to them. But I tried to explain to them why it was so hard for them to obey these little laws.

“It is,” I said, “because you did not help to make the laws yourselves, that you are tempted to break them out of mere mischief. Still, you would not lie about it, but rather do it openly, because you feel that truth between individuals is an inner law, the first step toward understanding. You know I believe that, even unconsciously, we have all always striven for this unity, this completeness that now we are going to strive for with open eyes.”

“And all bad leads in the same direction, and comes to good,” said Virginia.

“Now I want you to understand that clearly,” I said. “All bad things are bad only because they do not reach up to our idea of the best. But that bad things are turned to good, or used for good is because we use them so; because the desire and the striving for good is so strong within us, that we use them to fulfil that desire. It is not a necessity. It is a matter of choice. If we wish, we can use everything for good. And we often do so, even unconsciously. Everything strives toward that good, which is life itself.”

“Then you believe,” said Marian, “that even every criminal has some good in him?”

“Yes, surely,” I answered, “else he would not be here, alive, at all. Every living being is good; and if he is not so far as we at present, he may go farther than we some day. Surely, we will take him onward with us, else we cannot be complete. You must see that any one who believes the great good to be understanding love and unity, cannot be made whole till every one is made whole with him. He needs all the world.”

“Every one must feel that,” said Marian.

“The other day, Marian,” I went on, “you said: ‘If we can never reach the goal, what is the good of anything?’ Now, I, for one, believe in infinite good; I believe that no matter how far we go, we shall long to go farther, so that what now would seem unimaginably good to us might one day seem bad. Can you imagine stagnant perfection?”

“I think,” said Marian, “that a perfectly good world would be terribly monotonous.”

“That is what I think, too,” I answered. “What we love is the going forward, the achieving, the striving.”

Henry said: “It is like travelling toward the horizon, and we think that is the end. But when we reach it, we see another horizon.”