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| The Command to Love God and Our Neighbor Includes a Command to Love Ourselves.
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Chapter 26.—The Command to Love
God and Our Neighbor Includes a Command to Love
Ourselves.
27. Seeing, then, that there is
no need of a command that every man should love himself and his own
body,—seeing, that is, that we love ourselves, and what is
beneath us but connected with us, through a law of nature which has
never been violated, and which is common to us with the beasts (for
even the beasts love themselves and their own bodies),—it only
remained necessary to lay injunctions upon us in regard to God
above us, and our neighbor beside us. “Thou shalt love,” He
says, “the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy
soul, and with all thy mind; and thou shalt love thy neighbor as
thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets.”1738
Thus the
end of the commandment is love, and that twofold, the love of God
and the love of our neighbor. Now, if you take yourself in your
entirety,—that is, soul and body together,—and your neighbor in
his entirety, soul and body together (for man is made up of soul
and body), you will find that none of the classes of things that
are to be loved is overlooked in these two commandments. For
though, when the love of God comes first, and the measure of our
love for Him is prescribed in such terms that it is evident all
other things are to find their centre in Him, nothing seems to be
said about our love for ourselves; yet when it is said, “Thou
shall love thy neighbor as thyself,” it at once becomes evident
that our love for ourselves has not been overlooked.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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