Text of the meditation
The Great Law is good: the person of integrity is superior to fear, and failure, and poverty, and shame, and disgrace. The person who, fearing the loss of present pleasures or material comforts, denies the truth within them can be injured, and robbed, and degraded, and trampled upon, because they have first injured, robbed, degraded and trampled upon their own nobler self; but the person of steadfast virtue, of unblemished integrity, cannot be subject to such conditions, because they have denied the craven self within them and have taken refuge in Truth.
It is not the scourge and the chains that make a person a slave, but the fact that they are a slave. Slander, accusation and malice cannot affect the righteous person, nor call from them any bitter response, nor do they need to go about defending themselves and proving their innocence.
Innocence and integrity alone are a sufficient answer to all that hatred may attempt.
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.