such a word? What you wish done to
yourself, do to others." By some translators the rule is given in a
negative form, in which it is also found in the Jewish Talmud (Rabbi
Hillel), "Do not to another what thou wouldst not he should do to
thee; this is the sum of the law." So Thales, when asked for a rule of
life, taught, "That which thou blamest in another, do not thyself."
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," said the Hebrew book of
Leviticus. Iamblichus tells us that Pythagoras taught "the love of all
to all." "To live is not to live for one's self alone, let us help one
another," said the Greek dramatist Menander; and the Roman dramatist
Terence, following him, brought down the applause of the whole theatre
by the saying, "I am a man; I count nothing human foreign to me."
"Give bread to a stranger," said Quintilian, "in the name of the
universal brotherhood which binds together all men under the common
father of nature." "What good man will look on any suffering as
foreign to himself?" said the Latin satirist Juvenal. "This sympathy
is what distinguishes us from brutes," he adds. The poet Lucan
predicted a time when warlike weapons should be laid aside, and all
men love one another. "Nature has inclined us to love men," said
Cicero, "and this is the foundation of the law." He also described
his favorite virtue of justice as "devoting itself wholly to the good
of others." Seneca said, "We are members of one great body, Nature
planted in us a mutual love, and fitted us for a social life. We must
consider that we were born for the good of the whole." "Love mankind,"
wrote Marcus Antoninus, summing it all up in two words; while the
loving soul of Epictetus extended the sphere of mutual affection
beyond this earth, holding that "the universe is but one great city,
full of beloved ones, divine and human, by nature endeared to each
other."[C]
This sympathy of religions extends even to the loftiest virtues,--the
forgiveness of injuries, the love of enemies and the overcoming of
evil with good. "The wise man," said the Chinese Lao-tse, "avenges his
injuries with benefits." "Hatred," says a Buddhist sacred book, the
Dhammapada, "does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by
love; this is the eternal rule." "To overcome evil with good is good,
and to resist evil by evil is evil," says a Mohammedan manual of
ethics. "Turn not away from a sinner, but look on him with
compassion," says Saadi's Gulistan. "If thine
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