Re: Confidence

of the Lacedaemonians and others
scarce touch us. For what good is it to us? But the example of the death of
the martyrs touches us; for they are "our members." We have a common tie
with them. Their resolution can form ours, not only by example, but because
it has perhaps deserved ours. There is nothing of this in the examples of
the heathen. We have no tie with them; as we do not become rich by seeing a
stranger who is so, but in fact by seeing a father or a husband who is so.

482. Morality.--God having made the heavens and the earth, which do not feel
the happiness of their being, He has willed to make beings who should know
it, and who should compose a body of thinking members. For our members do
not feel the happiness of their union, of their wonderful intelligence, of
the care which has been taken to infuse into them minds, and to make them
grow and endure. How happy they would be if they saw and felt it! But for
this they would need to have intelligence to know it, and good-will to
consent to that of the universal soul. But if, having received intelligence,
they employed it to retain nourishment for themselves without allowing it to
pass to the other members, they would be not only unjust, but also
miserable, and would hate rather than love themselves; their blessedness, as
well as their duty, consisting in their consent to the guidance of the whole
soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love
themselves.

483. To be a member is to have neither life, being, nor movement, except
through the spirit of the body, and for the body.

The separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has only
a perishing and dying existence. Yet it