And you can love your neighbour as yourselves, because, and in as
far as you have in you the Spirit of God, the spirit of universal love,
which proceedeth out for ever both from the Father and the Son to all
beings and things which They have made.
And of one thing I am sure, that in proportion as you are led and
inspired by that Spirit of God which showed in our Lord, in the very
deepest and truest sense, as the spirit of humanity, just so you will
feel a genial and hearty pleasure in lessening all human suffering,
however slight; in increasing all harmless human pleasure, however
transitory; and in copying Him who, at the marriage feast, gracefully and
graciously turned the water into wine. I do not, of course, mean that
you are to do no more than that; to prefer sentiment to duty, to amuse
and glorify yourselves by paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, and
neglect the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.
But I do mean that you are not to distrust your own sentiments, not to
crush your own instinctive sympathies. The very lowest of them--that
which makes you shrink at the sight of pain, and rejoice in the sight of
pleasure, is not natural, and common to you with the animals; it is
supernatural and divine.
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