The way of truth and light is a way traveled by few

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The way of truth and light, virtue and goodness, is a way traveled by few. It is not the way of the masses. It is not the way of the crowd. It is not the way of the society or culture you are living in. It is a way that is the diametric opposite of the way of the crowd. The attitudes, outlooks, values and behavior of the crowd is the way of foolishness and sin. To walk the way of truth and light you must value virtue, goodness and truth more than the approval of the crowd. You have to be willing to endure hardships and the enmity and scorn of the crowd. You have to be willing to be different and to stand alone. To be true to the highest within you, you must ignore the crowd and forge your own way looking to biblical teaching, reason, conscience and good sense. We see this theme in the Bible. We find it in the writings of the great thinkers of the past.

John 15:18-21 If the world hates you, you know that it hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, A servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name's sake, because they do not know Him who sent Me. Words of Jesus

Romans 12:2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

James 4:4 Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God.

Titus 2:12 Teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly, in this present world;

1 Peter 4:3 For the time past of our life may suffice us to have wrought the will of the Gentiles, when we walked in lasciviousness, lusts, excess of wine, revellings, banquetings, and abominable idolatries: 4. Wherein they think it strange that ye run not with them to the same excess of riot, speaking evil of you:

1 John 2:15 Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. 17. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.

Few are those who wish to be endowed with virtue rather than to seem so. Cicero

The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. Aristotle

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

Aristotle

Bad people...are in conflict with themselves; they desire one thing and do another, like the incontinent who choose harmful pleasures instead of what they themselves believe to be good.

Aristotle

For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony.

Aristotle

I did not care for the things that most people care about – making money, having a comfortable home, high military or civil rank, and all the other activities, political appointments, secret societies, party organizations, which go on in our city . . . I set myself to do you – each one of you, individually and in private – what I hold to be the greatest possible service. I tried to persuade each one of you to concern himself less with what he has than with what he is, so as to render himself as excellent and as rational as possible. Socrates

Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses. Plato

A hero is born among a hundred, a wise man is found among a thousand, but an accomplished one might not be found even among a hundred thousand men. Plato

I never desired to please the rabble. What pleased them, I did not learn; and what I knew was far removed from their understanding. Epicurus

Humankind differs from the animals only by a little and most people throw that away. Confucius

Rest satisfied with doing well, and leave others to talk of you as they please. Pythagoras

Declining from the public ways, walk in unfrequented paths. Pythagoras

For it is dangerous to attach one's self to the crowd, and so long as each one of us is more willing to trust another than to judge for himself, we never show any judgement in the matter of living, but always a blind trust, and a mistake that has been passed on from hand to hand finally involves us and works our destruction. It is the example of other people that is our undoing; let us merely separate ourselves from the crowd, and we shall be made whole. But as it is, the populace, defending its own iniquity, pits itself against reason. And so we see the same thing happening that happens at the elections, where, when the fickle breeze of popular favour has shifted, the very same persons who chose the praetors wonder that those praetors were chosen. Seneca

When a mind is impressionable and has none too firm a hold on what is right, it must be rescued from the crowd: it is so easy for it to go over to the majority. Seneca

Men do not care how nobly they live, but only for how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man’s power to live long. Seneca

Away with the world’s opinion of you – it’s always unsettled and divided. Away with the pursuits that have occupied the whole of your life – death is going to deliver the verdict in your case. ... It’s only when you’re breathing your last that the way you’ve spent your time will become apparent. Seneca

How much trouble he avoids who does not look to see what his neighbour says or does or thinks, but only to what he does himself, that it may be just and pure; or as Agathon says, look not round at the depraved morals of others, but run straight along the line without deviating from it.

Marcus Aurelius

The Wit of Cheats, the Courage of a Whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore:
All, all look up, with reverential Awe,
At crimes that 'scape, or triumph o'er the Law:
While Truth, Worth, Wisdom, daily they decry-`
'Nothing is sacred now but Villainy'

Alexander Pope

Few things are needed to make a wise man happy; nothing can make a fool content; that is why most men are miserable. Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Oct 2014