Reason requires that we love ourselves, and love our
fellow-men, for and in order to the development of the highest gifts
and capacities that are in us. These are gifts and capacities divine,
preparing us to find our everlasting happiness in God. (_Ethics_, c.
ii., s. iv., n. 2, p. 22.) The love that we bear to ourselves and our
neighbour, in view of our coming from God and going to God, is called
the love of _charity_. Charity differs from philanthropy in looking
beyond the present life, and above creatures. A materialist and
atheist may possess philanthropy, but not charity.
3. Beside the twofold love, animal and intellectual, which we bear
ourselves, we may also and should love ourselves with the love of
charity, seeing God's gifts in us, and desiring the perfection of
those gifts in a happy eternity occupied with God. The charity which
we should thus bear to ourselves is the model of that which we owe to
our neighbour, whom we are to love _as ourselves_, not with the same
intensity, but with the same quality of love, wishing him the good,
human and divine, temporal and eternal, which we wish for ourselves,
though not so earnestly as we wish it for ourselves.
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