4. If you care about the approbation of people, you will never decide upon anything, for some people approve one thing, others another. It is necessary to decide for yourself, and it is much simpler.
5. In order to show yourself oflF before men you either praise yourself or censure yourself before others. If you praise yourself, people will not believe you. If you censure yourself, people will think worse of you than your words warrant. It is best to say nothing about yourself, and to
care for the judgment of your own conscience and not for the judgment of the people.
6. No man shows such regard for virtue and such loyalty to it as he who willingly loses a good reputation in order to remain good in his heart. Seneca.
7. If a man has learned to live only for human glory, he thinks it a hardship to be thought stupid, ignorant or very wicked, because of failing to do what everybody else is doing. But all hard things require work. And in this instance work must be done from two points of view; you must learn to scorn the judgment of people, and again you must learn to live for deeds, which are good, although people condemn you for doing them.
8. I must act as I think is right, and not as others think. This rule holds true in 2very day life just as it does in the intellectual life. This is a hard rule, because you are apt to meet people everywhere who think that they know your duties better than you. It is easy to live in the world in accord with the world's opinion, but in solitude it is easy to follow your own; blessed is the man who in the midst of a multitude does what he, in solitude has determined is the right thing to do.
9. All people live and act, both in accord with their own thoughts and with those of others. The principal difference between people is in ^^:e extent to which they live according to their own thoughts and according to the thoughts of others.
10. It seems passing strange that people should live neither for their own happiness nor for that of others, but merely for the praise of other people. Yet how few men there are who do not value the approbation of their acts by strangers more highly than their own happiness and that of others.
11. Man will never be accorded the praise x>f all without exception. If he is good, evil men will find something evil in him, and will either ridicule him or criticise him. If he is bad, good men will not approve of him. In order to obtain the praise of everybody, man must pretend to be good before good people, and bad before bad people. But both the good and the bad will in time discover his hypocrisy and will despise him. There is only one remedy: be good, do not worry about the opinion of others, and do not seek the reward of your life in the opinion of the people, but in your own.
"No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse."
"Neither do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish; but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved." Matthew ix, 16, 17.
This means that in order to begin to live a better life (and to make your life ever better, therein is all the life of man) you cannot stick to old habits, you must form new habits. You cannot follow what the ancients thought good, but you must form new habits of your own, without caring about what people consider good or evil.
12. It is hard to discern whether you serve the people for the sake of your soul or God, or for the sake of their praise. There is only one way to make sur*: if you perform a deed which you think is good, ask yourself would you still persist in it, if you knew in advance that it would remain unknown to all. If your answer is that you will do it anyhow, then surely that which you do is done for the sake of your soul, for God.
VI.
He Who Lives the True Life Does Not Require the
Praise of the People
1. Live alone, said a sage. This means, decide the problem of your life alone with your own self, with the God who lives within you, and not in accordance with the advice or the criticism of other people.
2. The advantage of serving God as compared with serving people is that before people you involuntarily seek to show yourself in the most favorable light and are annoyed if you are placed in an unfavorable light. There is nothing like that before God. He knows you as you are. No one can either over-praise you or slander you before Him, so that you need not seek to seem before him, but just to be good.
3. If you would have peace, try to please God. Different people crave different things: to-day they desire one thing, to-morrow another. You can never please the people. But God living within you always desires one thing, and you know what He desires.
4. Man must serve one of the two: either his soul or his body. If he would serve his soul, he must fight against sin. If he would serve his body, there is no need to fight against sin. He need only do that which is accepted by all.
5. There is only one way to have no faith in God whatever; it is always to think public opinion right, and to pay no attention to one's inner voice. Ruskin.
6. When we are seated upon a moving vessel and our eyes are fixed upon an object on the same vessel, we do not notice that we are moving. But if we look aside, upon something that is not moving along with us, for instance.
THE PATHWAY OF LIFE
upon the coast, we shall notice immediately that we are moving. It is the same with life. When the whole world lives a life that is not right, we fail to notice it, but should one only awake spiritually and live a godly life, the evil life of the others become immediately apparent. And the others always persecute those who do not live like the rest.
Pascal.
7. Train yourself to live so as not to think of public opinion, but to live only for the fulfillment of the law of your life, the will of God. Such solitary life, with God alone as companion, furnishes no incentive to good deeds in human glory, but it gives your soul a feeling of freedom and peace and stability and such an assured knowledge that your path is true, as he who lives for human glory can never know.
And every man can train himself to live so.
FALSE RELIGIONS
FALSE RELIGIONS
False religions are religions which people follow not because they have need of them for their souls' sake, but because they have faith in them who expound them.
I.
Wherein Consists the Delusion of False Religions?
1. People frequently imagine that they believe in the law of God, whereas they pin their faith merely to that in which all believe. All, however, believe not in the law of God, but call that the law of God which suits their life and does not interfere with it.
2. When people live in sin and error, they cannot be at peace. Their conscience accuses them. Therefore such people must do one of two things: either they must acknowledge their guilt before men and God and cease from sin, or continue their life of sin and their evil deeds and call such evil deeds good. It is for this class of people that the teachings of false religions are designed, since it is possible according to them to lead an evil life and to feel justified in doing so.
3. It is bad enough to lie to other people, but it is far worse to lie to oneself. It is harmful particularly for the reason that if you lie to others you may be exposed, but if you lie to yourself there is no one to expose you. Therefore take care not to lie to yourself, especially in the matters of faith.
4. "Believe or be damned." Herein is the main source of evil. If a man accepts without reasoning that which he should settle by the light of his reason, he loses in the end the capacity of reasoning, and not only falls into condemna-