Text of the meditation
Personal antipathies, however natural they may be to the animal nature, can have no place in the divine life. While a person is engaged in resisting evil, they are not only not practising the good; they are actually involved in the very passion and prejudice they condemn in another; and as a direct result of their attitude of mind, they are themselves resisted by others as evil.
Resist a person, a party, a religion, a government as evil, and you yourself will be resisted as evil. Whoever considers it a great evil that they should be persecuted and condemned, let them cease to persecute and condemn. Let them turn away from all they have regarded as evil until now, and begin to look for the good.
So deep and far-reaching is this precept that the practice of it will take a person far up the heights of spiritual knowledge and attainment. Whoever keeps the precepts of Jesus will conquer themselves, and will become divinely illuminated.
James Allen (1864–1912), Book of Meditations for Every Day in the Year (1913) – public-domain text, gently modernised.
The original 1913 text is in the public domain.
