nd 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 mor