ive peace of mind, no more than it is a soft couch which can give
rest to a fevered body. Restfulness must be produced from within.

There are, in fact, two roads to peace--we may conquer or we may be
conquered. A country may always enjoy peace, if it is prepared always to
submit to indignities, to accommodate itself to the demands of stronger
parties, and absolutely to dismiss from its mind all ideas of honour or
self-respect. This mode of obtaining peace has the advantages of easy
and speedy attainment--advantages to which every man naturally attaches
too high a value. For in the individual life we are daily choosing
either the one peace or the other; the unrighteous desires which
distract us we are either conquering or being conquered by. We are
either accepting the cheap peace that lies on this side of conflict, or
we are attaining or striving towards the peace that lies on the other
side of conflict. But the peace we gain by submission is both
short-lived and delusive. It is short-lived, for a gratified desire is
like a relieved beggar, who will quickly find his way back to you with
his request rather enlarged than curtailed; and it is delusive, because
it is a peace which is the beginning of bondage of the worst kind. Any
peace that is worth the having or worth the speaking about lies beyond,
at the other side of conflict. We cannot long veil this from ourselves:
we may decline the conflict and put off the evil day; but still we are
conscious that we have not the peace our natures crave until we subdue
the evil that is in us. We look and look for peace to distil upon us
from without, to rise and shine upon us as to-morrow's sun, without
effort of our own, and yet we know that such expectation is the merest
delusion, and that peace must begin within, must be found in ourselves
and not in our circumstances. We know that until our truest purposes are
in thorough harmony with our conscientious convictions we have no right
to peace. We know that we can have no deep and lasting peace until we
are satisfied with our own inward state, or are at least definitely on
the road to satisfaction.

Again, the peace of which Christ here speaks may be called His, as being
wrought out by Him, and as being only attainable by others through His
communication of it to them. We do at first inquire with surprise how it
is possible that any one can bequeath to us his own moral qualities.
This, in fact, is what one often wishes were possib