These people among whom
he is an alien have their own deep-rooted
religions and hereditary convictions, against
which he cannot offend. Unless his is an
abjectly narrow and unthinking mind, he sees
that their form of law and order is as good as
his own. What then can he do but reconcile
his conduct gradually to their rules? And then
if he dwells among them many years the sharp
edge of difference is worn away, and he forgets
at last where their faith ends and his commences.
Yet is it for his own people to say he
has done wrong, if he has injured no man and
remained just?

I am not attacking law and order; I do not
speak of these things with rash dislike. In
their place they are as vital and necessary as
the code which governs the life of a beehive
is to its successful conduct. What I wish to
point out is that law and order in themselves
are quite temporary and unsatisfactory.
a man's soul passes away from its brief
dwelling-place, thoughts of law and order do
not accompany it. If it is strong, it is the
ecstasy of true being and real life which it
becomes possessed of, as all know who have
watched by the dying. If the soul is weak, it
faints and fades away, overcome by the first
flush of the new life.

Am I speaking too positively? Only those
who live in the active life of the moment, who
have not watched beside the dead and dying,
who have not walked the battlefield and
looked in the faces of men in their last agony,
will say so. The strong man goes forth from
his body exultant.

Why? Because he is no longer held back
and made to quiver by hesitation. In the
strange moment of death he has had release
given him; and with a sudden passion of
delight he recognises that it is release. Had;
he been sure of this before, he would have
been a great sage, a man to rule the world,
for he would have had the power to rule
himself and his own body. That release from
the chains of ordinary life can be obtained as
easily during life as by death. It only needs a
sufficiently profound conviction to enable the
man to look on his body with the same emotions
as he would look on the body of another
man, or on the bodies of a thousand men. In
contemplating a battlefield it is impossible to
realize the agony of every sufferer; why, then,
realize your own pain more keenly than
another's? Mass the whole together, and look
at it all from a wider standpoint than that
of the individual life. That you actually feel
your own p