they employed it to retain nourishment
for themselves without allowing it to pass to the other members, they
would hate rather than love themselves; their blessedness, as well as
their duty, consisting in their consent to the guidance of the whole
soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love
themselves.

483

To be a member is to have neither life, being, nor movement, except
through the spirit of the body, and for the body.

The separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has
only a perishing and dying existence. Yet it believes it is a whole, and
seeing not the body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on
self, and desires to make itself both centre and body. But not having in
itself a principle of life, it only goes astray, and is astonished in
the uncertainty of its being; perceiving in fact that it is not a body,
and still not seeing that it is a member of a body. In short, when it
comes to know itself, it has returned as it were to its own home, and
loves itself only for the body. It deplores its past wanderings.

It cannot by its nature love any other thing, except for itself and to
subject it to self, because each thing loves itself more than all. But
in loving the body, it loves itself, because it only exists in it, by
it, and for it. _Qui adhaeret Deo unus spiritus est._[180]

The body loves the hand; and the hand, if it had a will, should love
itself in the same way as it is loved by the soul. All love which goes
beyond this is unfair.

_Adhaerens Deo unus spiritus est._ We love ourselves, because we are
members of Jesus Christ. We love Jesus Christ, because He is the body of
which we are members. All is one, one is in the other, like the Three
Persons.

484

Two laws[181] suffice to rule the whole Christian Republic better than
all the laws of statecraft.

485

The true and only virtue, then, is to hate self (for we are hateful on
account of lust), and to seek a truly lovable being to love. But as we
cannot love what is outside ourselves, we must love a being who is in
us, and is not ourselves; and that is true of each and all men. Now,
only the Universal Being is such. The kingdom of God is within us;[182]
the universal good is within us, is ourselves--and not ourselves.

486

The dignity of man in his innocence consisted in using and having
dominion over the creatures, but now in separating himself from them,
and subjecting hims