Maxims of the Saints

Of the love of God, there are various kinds—at least, there are various feelings which go under that name.

First: there is what may be called mercenary, or selfish love; that is, that love of God which originates in a sole regard to our own happiness. Those who love God with no other love than this, love Him just as the miser his money, and the voluptuous man his pleasures—attaching no value to God except as a means to an end; and that end is the gratification of themselves. Such love, if it can be called by that name, is unworthy of God. He does not ask it; He will not receive it.

Second: another kind of love does not exclude a regard to our own happiness as a motive of love, but requires this motive to be subordinate to a much higher one—namely, a regard to God's glory. It is a mixed state, in which we regard ourselves and God at the same time. This love is not necessarily selfish and wrong. When the two objects—God and ourselves—are relatively in the right position… it is unselfish and is right.

Mixed love becomes pure love, when the love of self is relatively, though not absolutely, lost in a regard to the will of God… When this result is attained, the motive of God's glory so expands itself, and so fills the mind, that the other motive—the regard to our own happiness—becomes so small, and so recedes from our inward notice, as to be practically annihilated.

It is then that God becomes what He ever ought to be: the center of the soul, to which all its affections tend; the great moral sun of the soul, from which all its light and all its warmth proceed.

Self is known no more—not because it is wrong to regard and to desire our own good, but because the object of desire is withdrawn from our notice. When the sun shines, the stars disappear. When God is in the soul, who can think of himself?