the hardest not to meet with a flash of anger and a returning stroke; the second of which refers to assaults on property, such as an attempt at legal robbery of a man’s undergarment; the third of which refers to forced labour, such as impressing a peasant to carry military or official baggage or documents—­a form of oppression only too well known under Roman rule in Christ’s days.  In regard to all three cases, He bids His disciples submit to the indignity, yield the coat, and go the mile.  But such yielding without resistance is not to be all.  The other cheek is to be given to the smiter; the more costly and ample outer garment is to be yielded up; the load is to be carried for two miles.  The disciple is to meet evil with a manifestation, not of anger, hatred, or intent to inflict retribution, but of readiness to submit to more.  It is a hard lesson, but clearly here, as always, the chief stress is to be laid, not on the outward action, but on the disposition, and on the action mainly as the outcome and exhibition of that.  If the cheek is turned, or the cloak yielded, or the second mile trudged with a lowering brow, and hate or anger boiling in the heart, the commandment is broken.  If the inner man rises in hot indignation against the evil and its doer, he is resisting evil more harmfully to himself than is many a man who makes his adversary’s cheeks tingle before his own have ceased to be reddened.  We have to get down into the depths of the soul, before we understand the meaning of non-resistance.  It would have been better if the eager controversy about the breadth of this commandment had oftener become a study of its depth, and if, instead of asking, ’Are we ever warranted in resisting?’ men had asked, ‘What in its full meaning is non-resistance?’ The truest answer is that it is a form of Love,—­love in the face of insults, wrongs, and domineering tyranny, such as are illustrated in Christ’s examples.  This article of Christ’s New Law comes last but one in the series of instances in which His transfiguring touch is laid on the Old Law, and the last of the series is that to which He has been steadily advancing from the first—­namely, the great Commandment of Love.  This precept stands immediately before that, and prepares for it.  It is, as suffused with the light of the sun that is all but risen, ‘Resist not evil,’ for ‘Love beareth all things.’

It is but a shallow stream that is worried into foam and made angry and noisy by the stones in its bed; a deep river flows smooth and silent above them.  Nothing will enable us to meet ‘evil’ with a patient yielding love which does not bring the faintest tinge of anger even into the cheek reddened by a rude hand, but the ’love of God shed abroad in the heart,’ and when that love fills a man, ’out of him will flow a river of living water,’ which will bury evil below its clear, gentle abundance, and, perchance, wash it of its foulness.  The ‘quality of’ this non-resistance ‘is twice blessed,’