to a
lie that they ought not to believe it, whatever advantage comes to me from
it; and likewise that they ought not to attach themselves to me; for they
ought to spend their life and their care in pleasing God, or in seeking Him.
472. Self-will will never be satisfied, though it should have command of all
it would; but we are satisfied from the moment we renounce it. Without it we
cannot be discontented; with it we cannot be content.
473. Let us imagine a body full of thinking members.
474. Members. To commence with that.--To regulate the love which we owe to
ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members, for we are
members of the whole, and must see how each member should love itself,
etc....
475. If the feet and the hands had a will of their own, they could only be
in their order in submitting this particular will to the primary will which
governs the whole body. Apart from that, they are in disorder and mischief;
but in willing only the good of the body, they accomplish their own good.
476. We must love God only and hate self only.
If the foot had always been ignorant that it belonged to the body, and that
there was a body on which it depended, if it had only had the knowledge and
the love of self, and if it came to know that it belonged to a body on which
it depended, what regret, what shame for its past life, for having been
useless to the body which inspired its life, which would have annihilated it
if it had rejected it and separated it from itself, as it kept itself apart
from the body! What prayers for it
.
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