d around; a subdued resistance to the soul's
delicate promptings to greater consecration, out of deference to
"breadth" or fear of ridicule. These, and such things, are what Christ
tells us we must hate. For these things are of the very essence of
worldliness. "If any man love the world," even in this sense, "the love
of the Father is not in him."

There are two ways of hating life, a true and a false. Some men hate
life because it hates them. They have seen through it, and it has turned
round upon them. They have drunk it, and come to the dregs; therefore
they hate it. This is one of the ways in which the man who loves his
life literally loses it. He loves it till he loses it, then he hates it
because it has fooled him. The other way is the religious. For religious
reasons a man deliberately braces himself to the systematic hating of
his life. "No man can serve two masters, for either he must hate the one
and love the other, or else he must hold to the one and despise the
other." Despising the other--this is hating life, limiting life. It is
not misanthropy, but Christianity.

This principle, as has been said, contains the true philosophy of
self-denial. It also holds the secret by which self-denial may be most
easily borne. A common conception of self-denial is that there are a
multitude of things about life which are to be put down with a high hand
the moment they make their appearance. They are temptations which are
not to be tolerated, but must be instantly crushed out of being with
pang and effort.

So life comes to be a constant and sore cutting off of things which we
love as our right hand. But now suppose one tried boldly to hate these
things? Suppose we deliberately made up our minds as to what things we
were henceforth to allow to become our life? Suppose we selected a given
area of our environment and determined once for all that our
correspondences should go to that alone, fencing in this area all round
with a morally impassable wall? True, to others, we should seem to live
a poorer life; they would see that our environment was circumscribed,
and call us narrow because it was narrow. But, well-chosen, this limited
life would be really the fullest life; it would be rich in the highest
and worthiest, and poor in the smallest and basest correspondences. The
well-defined spiritual life is not only the highest life, but it is also
the most easily lived. The whole cross is more easily carried than the
half. It