Here the colonel’s eyes widen, as do those of many other guests present, and he says, ‘Yes, if that is so, then earthly life is an exceedingly dangerous matter; who can stand firm in it?’
I say, ‘Everyone who lives according to My teaching. But whoever lives according to his own conceit, mostly saturated with self-love and pride, and cannot wholeheartedly forgive whoever had offended him in any way and bless him tenfold more, shall sooner or later taste the inevitable consequences of enmity. Against these he can expect no protection at all from Me unless he has paid his debt to his enemy down to the last heller! Therefore live in peace and harmony with everyone. It is better to suffer a wrong than to inflict even an apparent wrong on anyone. In this way you will bring no avengers upon yourselves, and the spirits that otherwise would have become your enemies will then become your guardian spirits and turn much calamity away from your heads!
‘But why is all this so, and why must it be so?’ Then I say, ‘Because it must be so according to My will and My unchangeable order!’
The colonel says, ‘Yes, Lord, now I recognize only too clearly Your most boundless love and wisdom, limited by nothing, and I say: if one day all people should come to be permeated by Your teaching, then the earth will have been transformed into the fullest kingdom of heaven! But when will that happen?
‘When I consider the great earth, of which no explorer has yet discovered where it begins and where it ends, and consider the countless people of every kind who inhabit the immeasurably wide globe, dizziness begins to seize me in all the branches of my life! The most uneducated and crudest malice seems to be the pervasive chief trait in the character of life of the great earth’s many inhabitants.
‘The vastly greater majority of people is thoroughly leavened with animal selfishness and fury-like pride!
‘Wherever a small, peace-loving people settled on the wide earth and rose to some prosperity through working together, the keen noses of wolf-men and tiger-men soon tracked it down, and it was attacked with hostility. The poor people were conquered and thereby made a thousand times unhappier than they had formerly been in their natural state!
‘But if such small, peaceful and educated peoples nevertheless held their own victoriously against their enemies through courage, the strength of wisdom and the energy of their spirit—enemies whom they naturally had to destroy for the most part with weapons in hand—yet the spirits of the slain enemies only then become their greatest and most harmful enemies, I ask quite openly, as I see it: how, when and under what circumstances will Your most salutary teaching ever take full root on earth and determine all people of the earth in their actions and conduct?
‘If only individual peoples bask most happily in the gentle rays of Your unsurpassable teaching, they will be surrounded day by day by ever more enemies. If they surrender to those enemies quite willingly, they will become nothing but slaves of their conquerors and have to submit to every oppression, however inhuman, and finally even to a prohibition against following and practicing this teaching of Yours.
‘But if by any means of power they become masters of their enemies, only then will the spirits and souls of the enemies killed in battle become in fullest measure their most invincible enemies. Then, in my admittedly unimportant judgment, the kingdom of heaven on earth will have its particular paths!
‘Whether one should do good to every enemy precisely in return for his evil, even, I say, for the best cause, I therefore leave very much an open question! I do not doubt at all that in this way one will turn many a blind enemy into a seeing friend. But whether such a rule can also be applied with blessing to great masses of enemies of the good cause—that, Lord, forgive my weak understanding, I would nevertheless somewhat doubt for the reasons already given!
‘The ill-fated Scylla and Charybdis always come to my mind here: if one successfully avoids the first, one is swallowed all the more surely by the second! Lord, just a little more light on this, and I will embrace all my enemies as brothers and release all the prisoners from the dungeons! Even all the thieves, robbers and murderers, however evil they may be?’