"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.
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.
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