Life which she offers, as in none other, there is presented to us a
means of fulfilling our end.

For it is she alone who even demands in the spiritual sphere a complete
and entire abnegation of self. From every other Christian body comes the
cry, Save your soul, assert your individuality, follow your conscience,
form your opinions; while she, and she alone, demands from her children
the sacrifice of their intellect, the submitting of their judgment, the
informing of their conscience by hers, and the obedience of their will
to her lightest command. For she, and she alone, is conscious of
possessing that Divinity, in complete submission to which lies the
salvation of Humanity. For she, as the coherent and organic mystical
Body of Christ, calls upon those who look to her to become, not merely
her children, but her very members; not to obey her as soldiers obey a
leader or citizens a Government, but as the hands and eyes and feet obey
a brain. Once, therefore, I understand this, I understand too how it is
that by being lost in her I save myself; that I lose only that which
hinders my activity, not that which fosters it. For when is my hand most
itself? When separated from the body, by paralysis or amputation? Or
when, in vital union with the brain, with every fibre alert and every
nerve alive, it obeys in every gesture and receives in every sensation a
life infinitely vaster and higher than any which it might, temporarily,
enjoy in independence? It is true that its capacity for pain is the
greater when it is so united, and that it would cease to suffer if once
its separation were accomplished; yet, simultaneously, it would lose all
that for which God made it and, _saving itself_, would be _lost_ indeed.

_I live_, then, the perfect Catholic may say, as none other can say,
when I have ceased to be myself. And _yet not I_, since I have lost my
Individualism. No longer do I claim any activity at all on my own