Photo Prayer:
Dear Lord Jesus, grant those who have passed eternal rest. Amen.
Self-preservation, or the impulsion towards personal life, or self-love, is the first instinct and law of being. Yet the positive law of God does not lay down this duty of loving ourselves; for
1. our tendency to the maintenance of natural life is already inordinate and excessive; and
2. the law of maintaining and loving our supernatural life is coincident with, or even identical with the first of all commandments, the love of God. For God is the source of our life: "in Him we live and move and have our being" (Acts xvii. 28). The propension towards the Supreme Life is also the propension towards our own life. On the other hand, indifference towards God and adhesion to His contradictory, sin, is identical with cutting ourselves off from life and all its advantages. "He that loveth iniquity hateth his own soul" (Ps. x. 6). The sinner hates his own soul as depriving it of its true life; he hates his body as leaving it exposed to eternal torments. The supposed love of self involved in sin is only the kind of love that would humor an infant by giving it an open razor to play with. The real nature of self-indulgence is at present veiled, and is to be known only through faith ; but its effects will one day show that the love of God is the only true and legitimate love of self, and that sin is self-hatred and self-destruction. The love of God is the only form of self-love in which there is no selfishness, no meanness and narrowness, but only glory to God and benefit to mankind.
