the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell: and great was the fall of
Now, after eighteen hundred years, the prophecy has been fulfilled. By not following Christ’s teaching in general and its manifestation in public life as nonresistance to evil, men involuntarily came to that position of inevitable ruin which was promised by Christ to those who would not follow His teaching.
People frequently think that the question of nonresistance to evil is an invented question, a question which it is possible to circumvent. It is, however, a question which life itself puts before all men and before every thinking man, and which invariably demands a solution. For men in their public life this question has, ever since the Christian teaching has been preached, been the same as the question for a traveller which road to take, when he comes to a fork on the highway on which he has been walking. He must go on, and he cannot say, “I will not think, and I will continue to walk as before.” Before this there was one road, and now there are two of them, and it is impossible to walk as before, and one of the two roads must inevitably be chosen.
Even so it has been impossible to say, ever since Christ’s teaching was made known to men, “I will continue to live as I lived before, without solving the question as to resisting or not resisting evil by means of violence.” It is inevitably necessary at the appearance of every struggle to solve the question, “Shall I with violence resist that which I consider to be an evil and violence, or not?”
The question as to resisting or not resisting evil by means of violence appeared when there arose the first struggle among men, since every struggle is nothing but a resistance by means of violence to what each of the contending parties considers to be an evil. But the men before Christ did not see that the resistance by means of violence to what each