T. 23. III. 4 – 6. Jesus: “This course is easy just because it makes no compromise. Yet it seems difficult to those who still believe that compromise is possible. They do not see that, if it is, salvation is attack!
Yet it is certain the belief that salvation is impossible cannot uphold a quiet, calm assurance it has come. Forgiveness cannot be ‘withheld a little.’ Nor is it possible to ‘attack for this’ and in another moment ‘love for that,’ yet understand forgiveness as it truly is.
Would you not want to recognize assault upon your peace in any form, if only thus does it become impossible that you lose sight of your salvation? Peace can be kept shining before your vision, forever clear and never out of sight, only if you defend it not. Those who believe that peace can be defended, and that attack is justified on its behalf, cannot perceive the peace that lies within them. How could they know? Could they accept forgiveness side by side with the belief that murder takes some forms by which their peace is saved? Would they be willing to accept the fact their savage purpose is directed but against themselves?
No one unites with ‘enemies,’ nor is at one with them in purpose! And no one who compromises with an enemy but hates him still, for what he kept from him. Mistake not ‘truce’ for peace, nor compromise for the escape from conflict altogether.
To be released from conflict means that it is over! The door is open; you have left the battleground. You have not lingered there in cowering hope that it will not return because the guns are stilled an instant, and the fear that haunts the place of death is not apparent.
There is no safety in a battleground. You can look down on it in safety from above and not be touched. But from within it you can find no safety. Not one tree left standing will shelter you. Not one illusion of protection stands against the remaining faith in murder.
Here stands the little self as a body, torn between the natural desire to communicate and the unnatural intent to murder and to die. Think you there is a form the murder takes that can offer safety? Can guilt be absent from a battlefield?”