482

Morality.—­God having made the heavens and the earth, which do not feel the happiness of their being, He has willed to make beings who should know it, and who should compose a body of thinking members.  For our members do not feel the happiness of their union, of their wonderful intelligence, of the care which has been taken to infuse into them minds, and to make them grow and endure.  How happy they would be if they saw and felt it!  But for this they would need to have intelligence to know it, and good-will to consent to that of the universal soul.  But if, having received intelligence, they employed it to retain nourishment for themselves without allowing it to pass to the other members, they would hate rather than love themselves; their blessedness, as well as their duty, consisting in their consent to the guidance of the whole soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love themselves.

483

To be a member is to have neither life, being, nor movement, except through the spirit of the body, and for the body.

The separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has only a perishing and dying existence.  Yet it believes it is a whole, and seeing not the body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on self, and desires to make itself both centre and body.  But not having in itself a principle of life, it only goes astray, and is astonished in the uncertainty of its being; perceiving in fact that it is not a body, and still not seeing that it is a member of a body.  In short, when it comes to know itself, it has returned as it were to its own home, and loves itself only for the body.  It deplores its past wanderings.

It cannot by its nature love any other thing, except for itself and to subject it to self, because each thing loves itself more than all.  But in loving the body, it loves itself, because it only exists in it, by it, and for it. Qui adhaeret Deo unus spiritus est.[180]

The body loves the hand; and the hand, if it had a will, should love itself in the same way as it is loved by the soul.  All love which goes beyond this is unfair.

Adhaerens Deo unus spiritus est. We love ourselves, because we are members of Jesus Christ.  We love Jesus Christ, because He is the body of which we are members.  All is one, one is in the other, like the Three Persons.

484

Two laws[181] suffice to rule the whole Christian Republic better than all the laws of statecraft.

485

The true and only virtue, then, is to hate self (for we are hateful on account of lust), and to seek a truly lovable being to love.  But as we cannot love what is outside ourselves, we must love a being who is in us, and is not ourselves; and that is true of each and all men.  Now, only the Universal Being is such.  The kingdom of God is within us;[182] the universal good is within us, is ourselves—­and not ourselves.