kill the obnoxious germ. There is no other permanent remedy; until this
is done, all relief is but temporary.

And if we desire to remove the distemper of sin, similarly it is
necessary to seek out the root of all sin. We can lay our finger on it
at once; it is inordinate self-love.

Ask yourself why you broke this or that commandment. It is because it
forbade you a satisfaction that you coveted, a satisfaction that your
self-love imperiously demanded; or it is because it prescribed an act
that cost an effort, and you loved yourself too much to make that
effort. Examine every failing, little or great, and you will trace them
back to the same source. If we thought more of God and less of
ourselves we would never sin. The sinner lives for himself first, and
for God afterwards.

Strange that such a sacred thing as love, the source of all good, may
thus, by abuse, become the fountainhead of all evil! Perhaps, if it
were not so sacred and prolific of good, its excess would not be so
unholy. But the higher you stand when you tumble, the greater the fall;
so the better a thing is in itself, the more abominable is its abuse.
Love directed aright, towards God first, is the fulfilment of the Law;
love misdirected is the very destruction of all law.

Yet it is not wrong to love oneself; that is the first law of nature.
One, and one only being, the Maker, are we bound to love more than
ourselves. The neighbor is to be loved as ourselves. And if our just
interests conflict with his, if our rights and his are opposed to each
other, there is no legitimate means but we may employ to obtain or
secure what is rightly ours. The evil of self-love lies in its abuse