“Love your enemies, and ye will have none,” is said in the teaching of the Twelve Apostles. This answer is not merely words, as those may imagine who are accustomed to think that the recommendation of love to one's enemies is something hyperbolical, and signifies not that which expressed, but something else. This answer is the indication of a very clear and definite activity, and of its consequences.

 

To love one's enemies—the Japanese, the Chinese, those yellow people toward whom benighted¹ men are now endeavoring to excite our hatred²—to love them 29means not to kill them for the purpose of having the right of poisoning them with opium³, as did the English; not to kill them in order to seize their land, as was done by the French, the Russians, and the Germans; not to bury them alive in punishment for injuring roads, not to tie them together by their hair, not to drown them in their river Amur, as did the Russians.

 

“A disciple⁴ is not above his master.… It is enough for a disciple that he be as his master.”

 

To love the yellow people, whom we call our foes⁵, means, not to teach them under the name of Christianity absurd superstitions⁷ about the fall of man, redemption, resurrection, etc., not to teach them the art of deceiving and killing⁸ others, but to teach them justice, unselfishness, compassion⁹, love—and that not by words, but by the example of our own good life. And what have we been doing to them, and are still doing?

 

If we did indeed love our enemies, if even now we began to love our enemies, the Japanese, we would have no enemy.

 

Therefore, however strange it may appear to those occupied with military plans, preparations, diplomatic considerations,

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