I must confess to you, my sisters, that I was astonished to read in one of
our Saint's letters that our Lord Jesus Christ did not possess the quality
of indifference in the sensitive part of His nature.
I will give the exact words in which this wonderful fact is stated. "This
virtue of indifference," he says, "is so excellent that our old Adam, and
the sensitive part of our human nature, so far as its natural powers go,
is not capable of it, no, not even in our Lord, who, as a child of Adam,
although exempt from all sin, and from everything pertaining to sin, yet in
the sensitive part of his nature and as regards his human faculties was in
no way indifferent, but desired not to die upon the Cross. Indifference,
and the exercise of it, is entirely reserved for the spirit, for the
supreme portion of our nature, for faculties set on fire by grace, and in
fine for Himself personally, inasmuch as He is divine and human, the New
Man. How, then, can we complain when as far as this lower portion of our
nature is concerned we find ourselves unable to be indifferent to life,
and to death, to health, and to sickness, to honour and to ignominy, to
pleasure and to pain, to comfort and to discomfort, when, in a word, we
feel in ourselves that conflict going on which the vessel of election
experienced in such a manner as to make him exclaim: _Unhappy man that I
am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?_"[1]
The love of ourselves is so deeply rooted in our nature that it is
impossible wholly to rid ourselves of it. Even grace does not do away with
our self-love, but only reduces it to the service of divine charity.
By the love of self I mean a natural, just, and legitimate love, so
legitimate indeed as to be commanded by the law of God which bids us love
our neighbour as ourselves; that is to say, according to God's will, which
is not only the one way in which we can rightly love our neighbour, but
also the one way in which we are commanded to love ourselves.
Nevertheless, this love of ourselves, however just and reasonable it may
be, turns only too easily, and too imperceptibly, into a self-love, which
is unlawful and forbidden, but into which even persons the most earnest and
the most spiritual are at times surprised.
We often think we love someone, or something in God, and for God, when it
is really only in ourselves, and for ourselves, that we do so. We think
sometimes that we have only an eye to the interests of God, which is His
glory, when it is really our own glory which we are seeking in our work.
This is when we stop short voluntarily at the creature to the prejudice
of the Creator; as comes to pass in all sin, whether mortal or venial. We
must therefore watch and be constantly on our guard lest we fall into this
snare. From it we must snatch our soul as we would a bird from the snare
of the fowler. We shall be safe if we remember that every just and lawful
love in us is always either in actual touch with the love of God, or can be
brought into such touch, whilst self-love is never in such touch, nor can
ever be brought into it.
This is the test by which we can detect the false coin that is mixed up
with the true.
[Footnote 1: Rom. vii. 24.]