Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/76

60 is actual in Jesus, is possible in Iscariot; give him time and opportunity, the man will appear in him also. I doubt not that the worst man ever hanged or even honoured for his crime, will one day attain a degree of love which the loftiest men now cannot comprehend. This power of loving to this degree, it seems to me, is generic, of the nature of man; the absence of it is a mark of immaturity, of greenness, and clownishness of the heart. But at this day the power of affection is distributed as diversely as power of mind or conscience, and so the faculty of loving is by no means the same in actual men. All are not at once capable of the same quality of love.

There are also different degrees of love occasioned by the character of the object of affection. All cannot receive the same quantity. Thus you cannot love a dog so well as a man, nor a base, mean man so much as a great, noble man, with the excellences of mind and conscience, heart and soul. Can you and I love an Arnold as well as a Washington? a kidnapper as well as a philanthropist? God may do so, not you and I. So with finite beings the degree of love is affected by the character of both the subject and the object of affection.

It is unfortunate that we have but one word in English to express affectional action in respect to myself and to other men; we speak of a man loving himself, and loving another. But it is plain that I cannot love myself at all in the sense that I love another; for self-love is intransitive,—subject and object are identical. It is one thing to desire my own delight, and something quite opposite to desire the delight of another. So, for the sake of clearness, I will use the words Self-love for the normal feeling of a man towards himself; Selfishness for the abnormal and excessive degree of this; and Love for the normal feeling towards others.

Self-love is the lesser cohesive attraction which keeps the man whole and a unit, which is necessary for his consistency and existence as an individual. It is a part of morality, and is to the man what impenetrability is to the atoms of matter, and what the centripetal force is to the orbs of heaven; without it, the man's personality would soon be lost in the press of other men.