PEACE ON EARTH: GOOD WILL TOWARD MEN:
by R. Machell
PEACE to all beings! is an Eastern benediction. Peace on earth: good will toward men! is the Christian expression of the same heart-felt emotion. But what is peace? Is it merely the suspension of war, or the prevention of war, or its postponement? Is a long period of peace merely in itself productive of "good will toward men"? Does prosperity necessarily produce generosity, love, nobility, dignity, purity, or happiness? Can we possibly answer in the affirmative with the statistics of want and crime, corruption and suicide before our eyes constantly? Is peace the absence of war? If so we must stretch the meaning of the word war very considerably, stretch it indeed until it includes all unbrotherly acts; but then it will include a great part of our commercial system as well as of our social life. What then? Is peace a mockery? If so why is it so generally recognized as a desirable state, a blessed state, a state of beauty and joy? The cessation of international wars, so greatly to be desired, is peace of one kind only. "The peace of God that passeth all understanding," is another.
It has been found that the greatest stability can be attained by maintaining rapid motion in a heavy body, as in the gyrostat, the power of which has made the monorail train and other strange things a possibility. Thus stability in mechanics is found to be increased by rapid motion; rest is produced by action. Even in the arts of peace, and indeed more particularly in these, prosperity depends upon intense activity; when the works are at rest there is not usually an extra amount of peace and good will in evidence. Prosperity is not the result of idleness, and peace is not attained by the prevention of war; an idle man may grow fat, and a nation that does not fight may grow rich; but the fat man is not the healthy man, not the ideal human being, and the rich nation is not the happy nation; neither the fat man nor the rich nation are types of true progress in the eyes of any but the grossest of materialists.
I venture to think that peace is not at all a question of war or its prevention, but entirely a matter of self-discipline: self-discipline in the individual, in the family, the community, the nation, and the entire human race. It is the result of ceaseless activity. If this activity of self-discipline (not self-torture or abuse of the body) ceases there is an end of the state of peace as surely as the top or gyrostat falls when its rotation ceases. The essence of this rotation is the recognition of the center or axis of rotation by all the particles of the revolving body, from which an important analogy may be drawn. Self-discipline begins at home, as surely as the circle can only be described around a center. A circle without a center is unthinkable, and so is self-control without a self; but as the center of any visible object is itself an abstract point (having no magnitude) but subsisting on the plane of the immaterial, so the self is not material, but in its spiritual reality bears a similar mysterious relation to the material body that the abstraction called the center bears to a mass. A homeless man may be self-disciplined, but a nation is not composed of homeless men; national life depends upon the family and the family depends upon the home. The home is the spiritual center of the nation. It is everywhere and depends upon the ceaseless activity of its parts. This is the great binding-force that holds a nation in balance, and when this home-life weakens, the whole nation, like a top whose rotation slows down, begins to wobble; then, like the top, it is likely to fall over and rush off violently in any direction, and it becomes a dead body.
So if we would have peace in ourselves we must keep up a ceaseless fight against the inertia of the lower nature and replace the false peace of inertia by the stability, which, as in the gyrostat, results from rapid motion round its own center—that is to say, constant attention to duty. If we would have peace in the nation we must have it in our homes, and the home must have its invisible center of attraction, and the constant attention to duty of its parts or members.
If this is established there will be no great need to think about the sorrows of international wars or the means of preventing them.
