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40 BYWAYS TO BLESSEDNESS

retaliate, and engage in bitter thoughts? Is it not because my pride is piqued or my vanity
wounded or my selfishness thwarted? Is not because my blind animal passions are aroused and
allowed to subdue my better nature? Seeing that I am hurt by another person’s attitude towards
me because of my own pride or vanity or ungoverned and unpurified passions, would it not be
better to look to the wrong in myself rather than the wrong in another, to get rid of pride and
vanity and passion, and so avoid being hurt at all?
By such self-questionings and their elucidation in the light of mild thoughts and dispassionate
conduct a man, gradually overcoming passion and rising out of the ignorance which gave rise to
passion, will at last reach that blessed state in which he will cease to see evil in others, and will
dwell in universal good-will and love and peace. Not that he will cease to see ignorance and folly;
not that he will cease to see suffering and sorrow and misery; not that he will cease to distinguish

between acts that are pure and impure, right and wrong, for, having put away passion and
prejudice, he will see these things in the full, clear light of knowledge, and exactly as they are; but
he will cease to see anything-any evil power- in another which can do him injury, which he must
violently oppose and strive to crush, and against which he must guard himself. Having arrived at
right understanding of evil by purging it away from his own heart he sees that it is a thing that
does not call for hatred and fear and resentment but for consideration, compassion, and love.
Shakespeare through one of his characters says: “There is no darkness but ignorance.” All evil
is ignorance, is dense darkness of mind, and the removal of sin from one’s mind is a coming out of
darkness into spiritual light. Evil is the negation of good, just as darkness is the negation, or
absence of light, and what is there in a negation to arouse anger or resentment? When night settles
down upon the world who is so foolish as to rail at the darkness? The enlightened man, likewise,
does not accuse or condemn the spiritual darkness in men’s hearts which is manifested in the form
of sin, though by gentle reproof he may sometimes point out where the light lies.
Now the ignorance to which I refer as evil, or as the source of evil, is two-fold. There is wrong-
doing which is committed without any knowledge of good and evil, and where there is no choice
— this is unconscious wrong-doing. Then there is wrong-doing which is done in the knowledge
that it ought not to be done — this is conscious wrong-doing; but both unconscious and conscious
wrong-doing arise in ignorance-that is, ignorance of the real nature and painful consequences of
the wrong-doing.
Why does a man continue to do certain things which he feels he ought not to do? If he knows
that what he is doing is wrong where lies the ignorance?
He continues to do those things because his knowledge of them is incomplete. He only knows
he ought not to do them by certain precepts without and qualms of conscience within, but he does
not fully and completely understand what he is doing. He knows that certain acts bring him
immediate pleasure, and so, in spite of the troubled conscience which follows that pleasure, he
continues to commit them. He is convinced that the pleasure is good and desirable, and therefore
to be enjoyed. He does not know that pleasure and pain are one, but thinks he can have the one
without the other. He has no knowledge of the law which governs human actions, and never thinks
of associating his sufferings with his own wrong-doing, but believes that they are caused by the
wrong-doing of others or are the mysterious dispensations of Providence, and therefore not to be