1 Thessalonians 5:15

1 Thessalonians 5:15. See that none render evil for evil. Ellicott objects to the remark of Jowett, that ‘it is not strictly true to say that Christianity alone or first forbade to return evil for evil. Plato knew that it was not the true definition of justice to do harm to one's enemies.' But there can be no doubt that Jowett might have proved his statement by referring not only to the commonly-cited passage from the Republic (i. 335), but to a much more striking passage in the Crito, where Plato represents Socrates as distinctly repudiating the popular opinion that justice consists in harming one's enemies and doing good to one's friends: ‘ Soc. To render evil for evil, is it right, as the many say, or not? Cr. Certainly not Soc. We must not then do wrong or do evil to any man, whatever we suffer from men.... I know that few do think this, and few will think it.... But this is what I long ago held and still do hold, that to do wrong and to return wrong to any one is never allowable, nor to protect oneself from wrong by doing wrong.' It is only apparently and not really that Xenophon (Mem. ii. 6) represents Socrates as relapsing into the popular view. But the opinion of Socrates met with little acceptance. And Isocrates, a representative moralist, maintains that ‘it is equally disgraceful to be outdone by one's friends in benefits or by one's enemies in injuries' (Isoc. ad Demon, c. 26). We must not however forget that some heathen exemplified, often in striking circumstances, the forgiveness of injuries (see Lykurgus' treatment of Alkander related by Plutarch, Lyk.), and it may be admitted as probable that had Socrates or Plato elaborated any complete system of morals, this virtue would have found a place in it; ‘anyhow, Christianity may claim this peculiar merit, that it has set up that type of conduct as a general law for every man, which among the ancients was admired as the exceptive virtue of the few' (Blackie's Four Phases of Morals, p. 283). Buddha and Confucius more nearly approached to the Christian law of forgiveness; but until Christ by His life and death showed it to be the law for God and man alike, no teacher, however he may have had glimpses of the truth, could hopefully promulgate it as a duty.

That which is good. ‘In the sense of kind and beneficent ' (Vaughan).