The Imitation.  We must read ourselves.  We must study, as we study nothing else, our own rent and distorted hearts.  Our own hearts must be our daily discovery.  We must watch the wounds our hearts take every day; and we must give all our powers of mind to tracing all our wounds back to their true causes.  We must say:  ’that sore blow came on my mind and on my heart from such and such a quarter, from such and such a hand, from such and such a weapon; but this pain, this rankling, poisoned, and ever-festering wound, this sleepless, gnawing, cancerous sore, comes from the covetousness, the pride, the envy, and the wrath of my own heart.’  When we begin to say that, we shall then begin to understand and to love Thomas; we shall sit daily at his feet and shall be numbered among his sons.

4.  And this suffering at our own hands goes on till at last the tables are completely turned against self-love, and till what was once to us the dearest thing in the whole world becomes, as Pascal says, the most hateful.  We begin life by hating the men, and the things, who hurt us.  We hate the men who oppose us and hinder us; the men who speak, and write, and act, and go in any way against us.  We bitterly hate all who humble us, despise us, trample upon us, and in any way ill-use us.  But afterwards, when we have become men, men in experience of this life, and, especially, of ourselves in this life; after we gain some real insight and attain to some real skill in the life of the heart, we come round to forgive those we once hated.  We have come now to see why they did it.  We see now exactly how much they hurt us after all, and how little.  And, especially, we have come to see,—­what at one time we could not have believed,—­that all our hurt, to be called hurt, has come to us from ourselves.  And thus that great revolution of mind and that great revulsion of feeling and of passion has taken place, after which we are left with no one henceforth to hate, to be called hating, but ourselves.  We may still continue to avoid our enemies, and we may do that too long and too much; we may continue to fear them and be on the watch against them far too much; but to deliberately hate them is henceforth impossible.  All our hatred,—­all our deliberate, steady, rooted, active hatred,—­is now at ourselves; at ourselves, that is, so far and so long as we remain under the malignant and hateful dominion of self-love.  When Butler gets our self-love restored to reasonableness, and made coincident with virtue and part of the idea; when our self-love becomes uniformly coincident with the principle of obedience to God’s commands, then we shall love ourselves as our neighbour, and our neighbour as ourselves, and both in God.  But, till then, there is nothing and no one on earth or in hell so hateful to us as ourselves and our own hateful hearts.  And if in that we are treading the winepress alone as far as our fellow-men are concerned, all the more we have