aving for more, more, always more, hunger of
eternity and thirst of infinity, appetite for God--these are never
satisfied. Each consciousness seeks to be itself and to be all other
consciousnesses without ceasing to be itself: it seeks to be God. And
matter, unconsciousness, tends to be less and less, tends to be nothing,
its thirst being a thirst for repose. Spirit says: I wish to be! and
matter answers: I wish not to be!

And in the order of human life, the individual would tend, under the
sole instigation of the instinct of preservation, the creator of the
material world, to destruction, to annihilation, if it were not for
society, which, in implanting in him the instinct of perpetuation, the
creator of the spiritual world, lifts and impels him towards the All,
towards immortalization. And everything that man does as a mere
individual, opposed to society, for the sake of his own preservation,
and at the expense of society, if need be, is bad; and everything that
he does as a social person, for the sake of the society in which he
himself is included, for the sake of its perpetuation and of the
perpetuation of himself in it, is good. And many of those who seem to be
the greatest egoists, trampling everything under their feet in their
zeal to bring their work to a successful issue, are in reality men
whose souls are aflame and overflowing with charity, for they subject
and subordinate their petty personal I to the social I that has a
mission to accomplish.

He who would tie the working of love, of spiritualization, of
liberation, to transitory and individual forms, crucifies God in matter;
he crucifies God who makes the ideal subservient to his own temporal
interests or worldly glory. And such a one is a deicide.

The work of charity, of the love of God, is to endeavour to liberate God
from brute matter, to endeavour to give consciousness to everything, to
spiritualize or universalize everything; it is to dream that the very
rocks may find a voice and work in accordance with the spirit of this
dream; it is to dream that everything that exists may become conscious,
that the Word may become life.

We have but to look at the eucharistic symbol to see an instance of it.
The Word has been imprisoned in a piece of material bread, and it has
been imprisoned therein to the end that we may eat it, and in eating it
make it our own, part and parcel of our body in which the spirit dwells,
and that it may beat in our heart and t