the more I am myself, the more I belong to others; out of the fullness
of myself I overflow upon my brothers, and as I overflow upon them they
enter into me.

"Be ye perfect, as your Father is perfect," we are bidden, and our
Father is perfect because He is Himself and because He is in each one of
His children who live and move and have their being in Him. And the end
of perfection is that we all may be one (John xvii. 21), all one body in
Christ (Rom. xii. 5), and that, at the last, when all things are subdued
unto the Son, the Son himself may be subject to Him that put all things
under him, that God may be all in all. And this is to make the Universe
consciousness, to make Nature a society, and a human society. And then
shall we be able confidently to call God Father.

I am aware that those who say that ethics is a science will say that
all this commentary of mine is nothing but rhetoric; but each man has
his own language and his own passion--that is to say, each man who knows
what passion is--and as for the man who knows it not, nothing will it
avail him to know science.

And the passion that finds its expression in this rhetoric, the devotees
of ethical science call egotism. But this egotism is the only true
remedy for egoism, spiritual avarice, the vice of preserving and
reserving oneself and of not striving to perennialize oneself by giving
oneself.

"Be not, and ye shall be mightier than all that is," said Fr. Juan de
los Angeles in one of his _Dialogos de la Conquista del Reina de Dios_
(_Dial._, iii., 8); but what does this "Be not" mean? May it not mean
paradoxically--and such a mode of expression is common with the
mystics--the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it
would appear to mean? Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism
an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the
monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity? And by the monastic
ethic I mean that of the solitary Carthusian, that of the hermit, who
flees from the world--perhaps carrying it with him nevertheless--in
order that he may live quite alone with a God who is lonely as himself;
not that of the Dominican inquisitor who scoured Provence in search of
Albigensian hearts to burn.

"Let God do it all," someone will say; but if man folds his arms, God
will go to sleep.

This Carthusian ethic and that scientific ethic which is derived from
ethical science--oh, this science of ethics!