at in him, "every man is against
every man," as is said of Ishmael. _Homo homini lupus_,' adds our brave
preacher. And Abbe Grou speaks out with the same challenge from the
opposite church pole, and says: 'Yes; self-love makes us touchy, ready to
take offence, ill-tempered, suspicious, severe, exacting, easily
offended; it keeps alive in our hearts a certain malignity, a secret joy
at the mortifications which befall our neighbour; it nourishes our
readiness to criticise, our dislike at certain persons, our ill-feeling,
our bitterness, and a thousand other things prejudicial to charity.'

3. 'Myself is my own worst enemy,' says Abbe Grou. That is to say, we
may have enemies who hate us more than we hate ourselves, and enemies who
would hurt us, if they could, as much as we hurt ourselves; but the
Abbe's point is that they cannot. And he is right. No man has ever hurt
me as I have hurt myself. There are men who hate me so much that they
would poison my life of all its peace and happiness if they could. But
they cannot. They cannot; but let them not be cast down on that account,
for there is one who can do, and who will do as long as he lives, what
they cannot do. A man's foes, to be called foes, are in his own house:
they are in his own heart. Let our enemies attend to their own peace and
happiness, and our self-love will do all, and more than all, that they
would fain do. At the most, they and their ill-will can only give
occasion to our self-love; but it is our self-love that seizes upon the
occasion, and through it rends and distorts our own hearts. And were our
hearts only pure of self-love, were our hearts only clothed with meekness
and humility, we could laugh at all the ill-will of our enemies as
leviathan laughs at the shaking of a spear. 'Know thou,' says A Kempis
to his son, 'that the love of thyself doth do thee more hurt than
anything in the whole world.' Yes; but we shall never know that by
merely reading _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, a