Chapter XXVIII

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Sacred Texts Taoism Buy this Book at Amazon.com

The Tao Teh King: A Short Study in Comparative Religion, by C. Spurgeon Medhurst, [1905], at sacred-texts.com

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CHAPTER XXVIII.

One conscious of virility, maintaining muliebrity, is a world-channel. From a world-channel the unchanging energy never departs. This is to revert to the state of infancy.

One conscious of brightness, placid in shade, is a world-model. In a world-model the unchanging energy remains undiminished. This is to revert to the unlimited.

One conscious of merit, content in disgrace, is a world-valley. In a world-valley the unchanging energy is sufficient. This is to revert to simplicity.

Simplicity scattered becomes capacity, and in the hands of the Holy Man, administrators.

Thus the Supreme Mandate may not be sundered.

True power is the power to be without power. The highest perfection is "infancy," "simplicity"—the surrender of the individual to the universal. Man is greatest when he stoops. The simplicity of the divine is more potent than the multiplied devices of human effort. Do we not read of Wisdom that "being but one she can do all things" (Wisdom of Solomon vii, 27); and did not the Christ choose "little children" as types of His kingdom? That man who is wise enough to emulate the simplicity of the child will, by the purity of his life and the strength of his thought, be an administrator and distributor of spiritual treasure, a great principle and mighty power which no evil force can divide.

In a word, the Kingdom of God will be established when the strong are willing to be weak; when the radiant are satisfied though clouded; when the meritorious though unknown are contented.

"When will Christ's kingdom be realized?" is one of the questions found in an uncanonical gospel. The answer is "When ye shall trample on the garment of shame, when the

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two shall be one and the male as the female, neither male nor female." In the end all consciousness of separation will be superseded, a state our author well calls—the unchanging energy.

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