our party, our business, our church, our empire--the I, the Me, the Mine, in its narrower or wider manifestations. Only the detached and purified heart can view all things--the irrational cruelty of circumstance, the tortures of war, the apparent injustice of life, the acts and beliefs of enemy and friend--in true proportion; and reckon with calm mind the sum of evil and good. Therefore the mystics tell us perpetually that "selfhood must be killed" before Reality can be attained. "Feel sin a lump, thou wottest never what, but none other thing than _thyself_," says _The Cloud of Unknowing_. "When the I, the Me, and the Mine are dead, the work of the Lord is done," says Kabir. The substance of that wrongness of act and relation which constitutes "sin" is the separation of the individual spirit from the whole; the ridiculous megalomania which makes each man the centre of his universe. Hence comes the turning inwards and condensation of his energies and desires, till they do indeed form a "lump"; a hard, tight core about which all the currents of his existence swirl. This heavy weight within the heart resists every outgoing impulse of the spirit; and tends to draw all things inward and downward to itself, never to pour itself forth in love, enthusiasm, sacrifice. "So long," says the _Theologia Germanica_, "as a man seeketh his own will and his own highest good, because it is his, and for his own sake, he will never find it: for so long as he doeth this, he is not seeking his own highest good, and how then should he find it? For so long as he doeth this, he seeketh himself, and dreameth that he is himself the highest good. . . . But whosoever seeketh, loveth, and pursueth goodness, as goodness and for the sake of goodness, and maketh that his end--for nothing but the love of goodness, not for love of the I, Me, Mine, Self, and the like--he will find the highest good, for he seeketh it aright, and they who seek it otherwise do err."