In man there is either too much matter or too much spirit, or to put it better, either he feels a hunger for spirit—­that is, for eternity—­or he feels a hunger for matter—­that is, submission to annihilation.  When spirit is in excess and he feels a hunger for yet more of it, he pours it forth and scatters it abroad, and in scattering it abroad he amplifies it with that of others; and on the contrary, when a man is avaricious of himself and thinks that he will preserve himself better by withdrawing within himself, he ends by losing all—­he is like the man who received the single talent:  he buried it in order that he might not lose it, and in the end he was bereft of it.  For to him that hath shall be given, but from him that hath but a little shall be taken away even the little that he hath.

Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect, we are bidden, and this terrible precept—­terrible because for us the infinite perfection of the Father is unattainable—­must be our supreme rule of conduct.  Unless a man aspires to the impossible, the possible that he achieves will be scarcely worth the trouble of achieving.  It behoves us to aspire to the impossible, to the absolute and infinite perfection, and to say to the Father, “Father, I cannot—­help Thou my impotence.”  And He acting in us will achieve it for us.

And to be perfect is to be all, it is to be myself and to be all else, it is to be humanity, it is to be the Universe.  And there is no other way of being all but to give oneself to all, and when all shall be in all, all will be in each one of us.  The apocatastasis is more than a mystical dream:  it is a rule of action, it is a beacon beckoning us to high exploits.

And from it springs the ethic of invasion, of domination, of aggression, of inquisition if you like.  For true charity is a kind of invasion—­it consists in putting my spirit into other spirits, in giving them my suffering as the food and consolation for their sufferings, in awakening their unrest with my unrest, in sharpening their hunger for God with my hunger for God.  It is not charity to rock and lull our brothers to sleep in the inertia and drowsiness of matter, but rather to awaken them to the uneasiness and torment of spirit.

To the fourteen works of mercy which we learnt in the Catechism of Christian Doctrine there should sometimes be added yet another, that of awakening the sleeper.  Sometimes, at any rate, and surely when the sleeper sleeps on the brink of a precipice, it is much more merciful to awaken him than to bury him after he is dead—­let us leave the dead to bury their dead.  It has been well said, “Whosoever loves thee dearly will make thee weep,” and charity often causes weeping.  “The love that does not mortify does not deserve so divine a name,” said that ardent Portuguese apostle, Fr. Thome de Jesus,[57] who was also the author of this ejaculation—­“O infinite fire, O eternal love, who weepest when thou hast naught to embrace and feed upon and many hearts to burn!” He who loves his neighbour burns his heart, and the heart, like green wood, in burning groans and distils itself in tears.