than that between victor and vanquished on the battlefield.  And even the purified hate that springs from war is fruitful.  War is, in its strictest sense, the sanctification of homicide; Cain is redeemed as a leader of armies.  And if Cain had not killed his brother Abel, perhaps he would have died by the hand of Abel.  God revealed Himself above all in war; He began by being the God of battles; and one of the greatest services of the Cross is that, in the form of the sword-hilt, it protects the hand that wields the sword.

The enemies of the State say that Cain, the fratricide, was the founder of the State.  And we must accept the fact and turn it to the glory of the State, the child of war.  Civilization began on the day on which one man, by subjecting another to his will and compelling him to do the work of two, was enabled to devote himself to the contemplation of the world and to set his captive upon works of luxury.  It was slavery that enabled Plato to speculate upon the ideal republic, and it was war that brought slavery about.  Not without reason was Athena the goddess of war and of wisdom.  But is there any need to repeat once again these obvious truths, which, though they have continually been forgotten, are continually rediscovered?

And the supreme commandment that arises out of love towards God, and the foundation of all morality, is this:  Yield yourself up entirely, give your spirit to the end that you may save it, that you may eternalize it.  Such is the sacrifice of life.

The individual qua individual, the wretched captive of the instinct of preservation and of the senses, cares only about preserving himself, and all his concern is that others should not force their way into his sphere, should not disturb him, should not interrupt his idleness; and in return for their abstention or for the sake of example he refrains from forcing himself upon them, from interrupting their idleness, from disturbing them, from taking possession of them.  “Do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you,” he translates thus:  I do not interfere with others—­let them not interfere with me.  And he shrinks and pines and perishes in this spiritual avarice and this repellent ethic of anarchic individualism:  each one for himself.  And as each one is not himself, he can hardly live for himself.

But as soon as the individual feels himself in society, he feels himself in God, and kindled by the instinct of perpetuation he glows with love towards God, and with a dominating charity he seeks to perpetuate himself in others, to perennialize his spirit, to eternalize it, to unnail God, and his sole desire is to seal his spirit upon other spirits and to receive their impress in return.  He has shaken off the yoke of his spiritual sloth and avarice.

Sloth, it is said, is the mother of all the vices; and in fact sloth does engender two vices—­avarice and envy—­which in their turn are the source of all the rest.  Sloth is the weight of matter, in itself inert, within us, and this sloth, while it professes to preserve us by economizing our forces, in reality attenuates us and reduces us to nothing.