Yes, certainly the happiness of community life is great and its
advantages inappreciable; but without the family spirit there is
no community, as there would be no beauty in the human body
without harmony in its members. Oh, never forget this comparison,
you who wish to live happy in religion, and who wish to make
others happy.

A community is a body. Now, as the members of a body, each in its
proper place and functions, live in perfect harmony, mutually
comfort, defend, and love each other, without being jealous or
vengeful, and have only in view the well-being of that body of
which they are parts, so in the community of which you are members
and in the employment assigned to you. Remember you are parts of a
whole, and that it is necessary to refer to this whole your time,
labour, and strength; to have the same thoughts, sentiments,
designs, and language, without which there would no longer exist
either body, members, parts, or whole. If you wish, then, to
obtain and practise the family spirit, study what passes within
you. Your actions bespeak your sentiments.

V

EGOTISM, OR SELF-SEEKING

EGOTISM, taking for its motto "Every one for himself," is very
much opposed to fraternal charity and the family spirit. It never
hesitates, when occasion offers, to sacrifice the common good to
its own. It isolates the individuals, makes them concentrated in
self, places them in the community, but not of it, makes them
strangers amongst their brethren, and tends to justify the words
of an impious writer, who calls monasteries "reunions of persons
who know not each other, who live without love, and die without
being regretted."

Egotism breeds distrust, jealousy, parties, aversions. It destroys
abnegation, humility, patience, and all other virtues. It
introduces a universal disgust and discontent, makes religious
lose their first fervour, presents an image of hell where one
expected to find a heaven on earth, saps the very foundation of
community life, and leads sooner or later to inevitable ruin.

As the family spirit causes the growth and prosperity of an order,
however feeble its beginning, so, on the other hand, egotism dries
the sap and renders it powerless, no matter what other advantages
it may enjoy. If the one, by uniting hearts, is a principle of
strength and duration, the other, by dividing, is a principle of
dissolution and decay. Sallust says that "the weakest things
become powerful by concord, and the gr