However, though we are careful to prepare our food well and to abstain from flesh eating or any other contaminating _outward_ influence, though we want to get away to the mountains to escape the sordid things of city life, and we want to rid ourselves of every outward thing that may prove a stumbling block to our progress, still what about the things that come from _within_, the thoughts we have in our minds and our mental food? It will avail us not one iota of good if we could feed our bodies upon nectar and ambrosia, the ethereal food of the gods, when the mind is a charnel house, a habitat of low thoughts, for then we are only as whited sepulchres, beautiful to behold from without but inwardly full of a nauseating stench; and this mental delinquency can be maintained just as easily and perhaps it is even more apt to be maintained in the solitude of the mountains or in a so-called spiritual retreat than in a city where we are busy with the work of our vocation. It is indeed a true saying that “an idle brain is the devil’s workshop,” and the safest way to attain to interior purity and cleanliness is to keep the mind busy all the time, guiding our desires, feelings, and emotions toward the practical problems of life, and working, each one in his own immediate environment, to find the poor and the needy that he may give them whatever help their cases require and merit. That class which has no ties of its own may profitably make ties of love and friendship with those who are loveless and friendless. Or if it is the care of a relative—wife, daughter, husband, or anyone else that claims us, let us remember the words of Christ when He said, “Who are my mother and my brother?” and answered the question by saying, “Those who do the will of my Father.” This saying has been misconstrued by some to mean that the Christ repudiated His physical relationships for the spiritual, but it is only necessary to remember that in the last moments of His life on earth He called to Him the disciple whom He loved and brought him to His mother, giving him to her as a son and charging the disciple to care for His parent. Love is the unifying force in life, and according to the higher teachings we are required to love our kin, but also to extend our love natures so that they may also include everyone else. It is good that we love our own mother and father, but we should also learn to love other people’s mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, for universal brotherhood can never become a fact so long as our love is confined only to the family. It must be made all inclusive.