homely to look upon, but rich and sweet within. For lack of love Dives becomes the beggar, but Lazarus in love alone finds a substitute for all his needs. And love is the Christian's most precious possession — his life. " God is love," says St. John; and elsewhere Christ says of Himself: " I am the life." This sentiment of the heart is the life of our life, the soul of our soul, " because," adds St. John, " whoever loves not remains in death." Now, it is not the dead but the living who praise the Lord; the body of Christ is the food not of the dead but of the living, and hence these and the other functions of religion can be fitly exercised only by him who lives by love. Without charity even the coordinate virtues are as dead as the members of the body without the soul. As medicines are stimulated into action by the body's natural heat, so the spiritual medicines of religion prove efficient only when the subject has a warm heart. Hence St. James's meaning when he says: " Faith without works [of love] is dead." Not that it ceases to be faith, but that it is to live faith what the stagnant pool is to the running stream. Aristotle says that human perfection consists in the exercise of the highest virtue, and of all virtues St. Paul assures us charity or love is the highest, the bond of perfection. Hence love is the very life of the perfect man. In the words of St. Irenaeus: "The perfect man is made up of body and soul and heart."
Next to life man's greatest need is heat, and what heat is to the body, love is to the soul. God, who is
