the pagan world, having degraded and outraged woman, seemed to take pleasure in heaping scorn and ignominy upon her, and even to-day in heathen lands her lot is little better.
Classed with slaves, thrust aside, mistrusted, kept in ignorance, her whom nature has overburdened man was not ashamed to trample on. The wife makes the home, the mother the man. And yet in reading the literatures of Greece and Rome we are hardly made aware that their great men had wives and mothers, so little does woman play a part in their history, except as an instrument of pleasure. The ancients, in fact, had no right conception of love; never knew that God is love, that the last word of all things, the absolute and final good, is love; that true love, or love of the true good, which is itself love, is the central source whence all wisdom springs. Christ having come, religion is, as Pascal says, God sensible to the heart, which has reasons of its own that reason hardly knows; a method of its own, which is the method of charity—that of Jesus, who finds the root and source of all sin in the lack of affection, in the hardness of the heart, that seeks itself and is thus made the victim of pride, of greed and of lust.
Nothing is beautiful, nothing sublime, but the immensity of love; and nothing brings perfect joy and peace but complete self-surrender to God, which is love's highest act. Divine beauty holds the secret of the universe,—it is the cause of love, and love is the cause of all things. They alone have the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Christ, who love Him and all men. Whatever we do, if it be done for love, is rightly done. Like a pure flame, love embraces, interpenetrates and fills with light every duty imposed upon us; nay, if duty be also love, nothing else smiles on us with so fair a face. "Where there is love," says St. Augustine, "there is no toil; or if toil, the toil itself is loved." They who love God think not of themselves, but give their time, their strength, their heart, their health, their life, to serve those whom it is possible for them to help. Our capacity is measured by our power of love. We can do or learn to do whatever with all our soul we desire and will to do. As we are most surely reached through our affections, our nature is best explained by them. We are what we love far more
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