Doing an act of kindness for an evildoer is like giving bread to a devil;
the devil will turn it into poison. All bread that is in the hand of a devil is
poison. If it is not, the devil will turn it into poison by diverting the act of
kindness to an evil purpose.
It is as if you handed your enemy a sword, and the enemy killed
someone with it. It is as if you gave a shepherd’s staff to a human wolf to
bring the sheep into the pasture; yet the human wolf, staff in hand, drove
the sheep away from the pasture into the wilderness and slaughtered
them there. It is as if you gave leadership and control to a thief whose
sole focus was keeping an eye out for things to steal; the thief would cre-
ate rules and make decisions based primarily on the abundance and value
of the loot.There Are Obligations That Are Related to Goodwill.
Some of Them Are Public; Some Relate to the Household; and
Some Are Personal429 Acts of kindness related to goodwill and obligations related to goodwill
are distinguished from each other thus: The former belong to those
things that we may or may not do of our own free choice and the latter
to those that we must of necessity do. Nevertheless the obligations
related to goodwill mentioned here do not mean the obligations con-
nected with our job in our country or republic, such as the obligation a
minister has to minister and the obligation a judge has to judge, and so
on. They mean the obligations we all have regardless of the jobs we do.
These have a different origin and flow from a different intention. These
obligations are done with goodwill by people who have goodwill; they
are done without goodwill by people who have none.
430 Public obligations that are related to goodwillare primarily the paying
of taxes. These taxes are not to be confused with obligations connected
with our jobs. Spiritual people pay their taxes with a different feeling at
heart than people who are merely earthly. Spiritual people pay taxes in a
spirit of goodwill, because the taxes are collected to preserve the country
and protect both it and the church. The taxes also pay for administration
by government officials whose salaries and stipends have to be paid out
of the public treasury. Therefore people who hold their country and their
church as their neighbor pay taxes uncoerced, of their own free will, and
consider it wrong to cheat or avoid them. People who do not hold their