Page 34 - 102717-James Allen-Byways to Blessedness-flipbookversion_Neat

30 BYWAYS TO BLESSEDNESS

To see others as they are you must not allow impulsive likes and dislikes, powerful prejudices,
or egotistic considerations to come between you and them. You must not resent their actions or
condemn their beliefs and opinions. You must leave yourself entirely out, and must, for the time
being, assume their position. Only in this way can you become en rapport with them, and so
fathom their life, their experience, and understand it, and when a man is understood it becomes
impossible to condemn him. Men misjudge, condemn, and avoid each other because they do not
understand each other, and they do not understand each other because they have not overcome
and purified themselves.
Life is growth, development, evolution, and there is no essential distinction between the sinner
and the saint — there is only a difference in degree. The saint was once a sinner; the sinner will
one day be a saint. The sinner is the child; the saint is the grown man. He who separates himself

from sinners, regarding them as wicked men to be avoided, is like a man avoiding contact with
little children because they are unwise, disobedient, and play with toys.
All life is one, but it has a variety of manifestations. The grown flower is not something distinct
from the tree: it is a part of it; is only another form of leaf. Steam is not something apart from
water: it is but another form of water. And in like manner good is transmuted evil: the saint is the
sinner developed and transformed.
The sinner is one whose understanding is undeveloped, and he ignorantly chooses wrong
modes of action. The saint is one whose understanding is ripened, and he wisely chooses right
modes of action. The sinner condemns the sinner, condemnation being a wrong mode of action.
The saint never condemns the sinner, remembering that he himself formerly occupied the same
place, but thinks of him with deep sympathy, regarding him in the light of a younger brother or a
friend, for sympathy is a right and enlightened mode of action.
The perfected saint, who gives sympathy to all, needs it of none, for he has transcended sin and
suffering, and lives in the enjoyment of lasting bliss; but all who suffer need sympathy, and all who
sin must suffer. When a man comes to understand that every sin, whether of thought or deed,
receives its just quota of suffering he ceases to condemn and begins to sympathise, seeing the
sufferings which sin entails; and he comes to such understanding by purifying himself.
As a man purges himself of passions, as he transmutes his selfish desires and puts under foot
his egotistic tendencies, he sounds the depths of all human experiences — all sins and sufferings
and sorrows, all motives and thoughts and deeds — and comprehends the moral law in its
perfection. Complete self-conquest is perfect knowledge, perfect sympathy, and he who views men
with the stainless vision of a pure heart views them with a pitying heart, sees them as a part of
himself, not as something defiled and separate and distinct, but as his very self, sinning as he has
sinned, suffering as he has suffered, sorrowing as he has sorrowed, yet, withal, glad in the
knowledge that they will come, as he has come, to perfect peace at last.
The truly good and wise man cannot be a passionate partisan, but extends his sympathy to all,
seeing no evil in others to be condemned and resisted, but seeing the sin which is pleasant to the
sinner, and the after-sorrow and pain which the sinner does not see, and, when it overtakes him,
does not understand.