Page:The astral world, higher occult powers; (IA astralworldhighe00tiff).pdf/64

 supplied in the experience of those joys which can be found alone in that relation, and God speaks saying, "Well done," and breathes his divine blessing upon them. So it is in the fraternal relation. Where from the natural, constitutional harmony of soul existing between brothers, each being individualized upon a common moral plane, and loving the other with a pure and undefiled love, their love belongs to the second sphere.

Where the individual loves his neighbor as himself, he would as soon sacrifice his own interest as that of his neighbor, and would as soon be unjust to himself, nay, sooner be unjust to himself, than to his neighbor. He loves that neighbor with a pure heart, loves him as a manifestation of his divine Father's Love, Will, and Wisdom, and seeks to harmonize his own being with him in all his relations. He can not see a brother, however weak, crushed, without seeing himself crushed in that brother. When he loves a brother with that pure, unselfish love—when the common heart of humanity abides in his breast, he comes into the true plane of charity; for charity is that which seeketh not her own. The motive that prompts him is not self-gain. It is the desire to do good unto others that actuates him. The quality of charity is to suffer long, not to be envious, not to be easily provoked, not to be puffed up, or behave itself unseemly; but in all things to be true and faithful, and kind to everybody. The man or woman possessed of this love, whose whole being and activity is directed in the sphere of relation to man, to society, to the world, belongs to what I call the second sphere, and gives evidence that he or she has risen