Dost thou happiness resign
     To another?  It is thine—­
     Larger for the largess—­still![178]

And Victor Hugo, personifying Charity, makes her speak as follows: 

     Dear to every man that lives,
     Joy I bring to him who gives,
     Joy I leave with him who takes.[179]

And because this thought is profound as well as beautiful, it has been taken up by the philosophers.  “To love,” said Leibnitz, “is to place one’s happiness in the happiness of another.”  Here is the connecting link between Platonic love and the love which is charity.  Hear how a Christian orator comments upon these words:—­“This sublime definition has no need of explanations:  it is either understood at once, or it is not understood.  The man who has loved understands it; and he who has not loved will never understand it.  He who has loved knows that a shadow in the heart of the beloved one would darken his own:  he knows that he would reckon no means too costly—­watchings, labors, privations—­by which to create a smile on the lips of the sorrowful; he knows that he would die to redeem a forfeited life; he knows that he would be happy in another’s welfare, happy in his graces, happy in his virtues, happy in his glory, happy in his happiness.  The man who has loved knows all this; he who has not loved knows nothing of it:—­I pity him!"[180]

But the great mistake, which seems peculiar to our nature, is that we are ever connecting happiness with the idea of receiving, and are always thinking of giving as of a loss to ourselves.  We do not understand that selfishly to keep is to be impoverished, while freely to relinquish is to be enriched.  Yet here is the grand discovery of the spiritual life; and once this discovery made, in order that the spiritual life may attain its object, it only remains to find the strength to put it into practice.  Selfishness is wrong, no doubt, but it is not only wrong, it is ignorant, for it looks for happiness where it is not; and it is unhappy, for it wanders from the paths of peace.

Let us now apply these considerations to the Infinite Being, and to the problem of the end of the creation.  Leaving ourselves to the guidance of the laws of our reason, let us ask what object we shall be able to attribute to the Creator in His work?  Will creation be the effect of a necessity?  No, Sirs, for in that case everything in the world would be a matter of fate, and liberty would remain inexplicable.  If a blind power were directing the Almighty Will, we should return to the worship of destiny.  Will creation, then, be the carrying out of a design of which the motive is interest?  But what conceivable interest can influence Him who is the plentitude of being?  Or will creation be a duty?  But whence should come the obligation for the Being who is in Himself the absolute law?  Creation can only be conceived of as a work of love.  But of what love?  Of that which is the manifestation of absolute disinterestedness,