This is the love of God, and the love of God is virtue itself. We ought to love God without consideration of the good He can do us and of the penalties He can inflict upon us; for to love God from love of a beneficent God or from fear of a punitive God is not to love God but to love oneself. THE PASSIONS.--We have our passions as enemies and as obstacles to our elevation to this semi-perfection. It is they which cause us to do immoral acts. "Immoral," has that a meaning from the moment that we do nothing which we are not obliged to do? Yes, just as when led by our deceitful mind we have arrived necessarily at a false idea, the fact of this thought being necessary does not prevent it from being false; we may have been led by necessity to commit a villainous action, but that does not prevent its being immoral. The passions are our imperfections, omissions, gaps in a soul which is not full of the idea of God and of universal order and the love of God and of universal order, and which, in consequence, lives individually--that is, separated from the universe. The passions are infinite in number and Spinoza, in a bulky volume, furnished a minute and singularly profound description of the principal ones alone, into the details of which we regret that we cannot enter. The _Ethics_ of Spinoza is an incomparable masterpiece. The study of the passions is very salutary, because in studying them one gets so detached from them that one can perceive their emptiness, their meanness, and their puerile, nay, even bestial character. It might even be added that the mere thought of studying them is already an act of detachment in reference to them. "Thou wouldst not seek Me, hadst thou not already found Me," said God to Pascal. "Thou wouldst not make investigations about us, hadst thou not already quitted us," the passions might say to the philosopher. SANCTIONS OF MORALITY.--What are the sanctions of morality? They are necessary sanctions; just as everything is necessary and may even be said to be mechanical. There is neither merit nor demerit and the criminal is not culpable; only he is outside order, and everything must be in order. "He who is maddened by the bite of a mad dog is certainly innocent; yet anyone has the right to suffocate him. In the same way, the man who cannot govern his passions by fear of the law is a very excusable invalid; yet he cannot enjoy peace of mind, or the knowledge of God, or even the love of God, and it is necessary that he perish." Through death he has re-entered within order.