“Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourselves bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth. For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Deny thyself, take up thy cross daily, and follow me. My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to do His work. Not my will be done, but Thine; not what I want, but what Thou wantest, and not as I want, but as Thou wantest. The life is in this, not to do one’s will, but the will of God.
All these propositions seem to men who are standing on a lower life-conception to be an expression of an ecstatic transport, which has no direct applicability to life. And yet these propositions just as strictly result from the Christian conception of life as the tenet about giving up one’s labor for the common good, about sacrificing one’s life in the defence of one’s country, results from the social conception.
Just as a man of the social life-conception says to a savage, “Come to your senses, bethink yourself! The life of your personality cannot be the true life, because it is wretched and transitory. Only the life of the aggregate and of the sequence of personalities, of the tribe, the family, the race, the state, is continued and lives, and so a man must sacrifice his personality for the life of the family, the state.” Precisely the same the Christian teaching says to a man of the aggregate, of the social conception of life. “Repent, μετανοεἳτε , that is, bethink yourselves, or else you will perish. Remember that this carnal, personal life, which originated today and will be destroyed tomorrow, cannot be made secure in any way, that no