But if you avoid the temptation, and remembering that the Spirit has no limitations, and that you can draw and draw and draw on the love within you and never find the bottom of the source of love; if you are strong enough to do that, then the love of the family, of the community, of the State, will widen out into the love of humanity, and you shall know yourself as one with all, and not only with your family, or your community, or your nation.

All these local loves are schoolmasters to bring us to the wider love of man.

But do not blunder in the idea that you can have the wider unless you have gone through the narrower; for the bad husband, the bad citizen, the bad patriot, will never make a real lover of humanity.

He must learn his alphabet before he can read in this book of love, and must spell out the letters before he may pronounce the word.

None the less, these successive stages are all stages towards the spiritual life, and prepare the man for the consciously spiritual realisation.