"The law of reason reveals itself to men gradually."[895] "Eighteen hundred years ago there appeared in the midst of the pagan Roman world a remarkable new teaching, which was not comparable to any that had preceded it, and which was ascribed to a man called Christ."[896] This teaching contains "the very strictest, purest, and completest"[897] apprehension of the law of reason to which "the human mind has hitherto raised itself."[898] Christ's teaching is "reason itself";[899] it must be accepted by men because it alone gives those rules of life "without which no man ever has lived or can live, if he would live as a man,--that is, with reason."[900] Man has, "on the basis of reason, no right to refuse allegiance to it."[901] 2. Christ's teaching sets up love as the supreme law for us. What is love? "What men who do not understand life call 'love' is only the giving to certain conditions of their personal comfort a preference over any others. When the man who does not understand life says that he loves his wife or child or friend, he means by this only that his wife's, child's, or friend's presence in his life heightens his personal comfort."[902] "True love is always renunciation of one's personal comfort"[903] for a neighbor's sake. True love "is a condition of wishing well to all men, such as commonly characterizes children but is produced in grown men only by self-abnegation."[904] "What living man does not know the happy feeling, even if he has felt it only once and in most cases only in earliest childhood, of that emotion in which one wishes to love everybody, neighbors and father and mother and brothers and bad men and enemies and dog and horse and grass; one wishes only one thing, that it were well with all, that all were happy; and still more does one wish that he were himself capable of making all happy, one wishes he might give himself, give his whole life, that all might be well off and enjoy themselves. Just this, this alone, is that love in which man's life consists."[905] True love is "an ideal of full, infinite, divine perfection."[906] "Divine perfection is the asymptote of human life, toward which it constantly strives, to which it draws nearer and nearer, but which can be attained only at infinity."[907] "True life, according to previous teachings, consists in the fulfilling of commandments, the fulfilling of the law; according to Christ's teaching it consists in the maximum approach to the divine perfection which has been exhibited, and which is felt in himself by every man."[908]