oot with them, neither is their lot indifferent to us, but
their pain hurts us, their anguish fills us with anguish, and we feel
our community of origin and of suffering even without knowing it.
Suffering, and pity which is born of suffering, are what reveal to us
the brotherhood of every existing thing that possesses life and more or
less of consciousness. "Brother Wolf" St. Francis of Assisi called the
poor wolf that feels a painful hunger for the sheep, and feels, too,
perhaps, the pain of having to devour them; and this brotherhood reveals
to us the Fatherhood of God, reveals to us that God is a Father and that
He exists. And as a Father He shelters our common misery.

Charity, then, is the impulse to liberate myself and all my fellows from
suffering, and to liberate God, who embraces us all.

Suffering is a spiritual thing. It is the most immediate revelation of
consciousness, and it may be that our body was given us simply in order
that suffering might be enabled to manifest itself. A man who had never
known suffering, either in greater or less degree, would scarcely
possess consciousness of himself. The child first cries at birth when
the air, entering into his lungs and limiting him, seems to say to him:
You have to breathe me in order that you may live!

We must needs believe with faith, whatever counsels reason may give us,
that the material or sensible world which the senses create for us
exists solely in order to embody and sustain that other spiritual or
imaginable world which the imagination creates for us. Consciousness
tends to be ever more and more consciousness, to intensify its
consciousness, to acquire full consciousness of its complete self, of
the whole of its content. We must needs believe with faith, whatever
counsels reason may give us, that in the depths of our own bodies, in
animals, in plants, in rocks, in everything that lives, in all the
Universe, there is a spirit that strives to know itself, to acquire
consciousness of itself, to be itself--for to be oneself is to know
oneself--to be pure spirit; and since it can only achieve this by means
of the body, by means of matter, it creates and makes use of matter at
the same time that it remains the prisoner of it. The face can only see
itself when portrayed in the mirror, but in order to see itself it must
remain the prisoner of the mirror in which it sees itself, and the image
which it sees therein is as the mirror distorts it; and if the mir