ake credit for afterward.+--Love comes to us
of itself; it springs up spontaneously within our breasts. We can
prepare our hearts for its entrance; we can welcome and cherish it when
it comes. We cannot boast of it, for we could not help it. Love is the
welling up within us of our true social nature; which nothing but our
indifference and lack of sympathy could have kept so long repressed.
"Love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself
unseemly, seeketh not its own." Love "seeketh not its own" because it
has no own to seek.

+Selfishness on the contrary knows all about itself; has a good opinion
of itself; never gets its own interests mixed up with those of anybody
else; can always give a perfectly satisfactory account of itself.+

Hence when we know exactly how we came to do a thing, and appreciate
keenly how good it was of us to do it; and think how very much obliged
the other person ought to be to us for doing it, we may be pretty sure
that it was not love, but some more or less subtle form of selfishness
that prompted it. Love and selfishness may do precisely the same things.
Under the influence of either love or selfishness I may "bestow all my
goods to feed the poor and give my body to be burned," but love alone
profiteth; while all the subtle forms of selfishness and self-seeking
are "sounding brass and clanging cymbal." Selfishness, even when it does
a service, has its eye on its own merit, or the reward it is to gain. In
so doing it forfeits merit and reward both. Selfishness never succeeds
in getting outside of itself. From all the joys and graces of the social
life it remains in perpetual banishment. Love loses itself in the
object loved, and so finds a larger and better self. Selfishness tries
to use the object of its so-called love as a means to its own
gratification, and so remains to the end in loveless isolation. Many
manifestations of selfishness look very much like love. To know the real
difference is the most fundamental moral insight. On it depend the
issues of life and death.

THE VICE OF EXCESS.

+The most flagrant mockery of love is sentimentality.+--The
sentimentalist is on hand wherever there is a chance either to mourn or
to rejoice. He is never so happy as when he is pouring forth a gush of
feeling; and it matters little whether it be laughter or tears, sorrow
or joy, to which he is permitted to give vent. On the surface he seems
to be overflowing with the milk of hu