. . for as many as were possessors of lands or
houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold
and laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made
unto every man according as he had need," all happy in being together,
in mutual love and in feeling themselves regenerate or pure.
Here is to be found in the soul a new regulator and motor, and
moreover a powerful organ, appropriate and effective, obtained through
internal recasting and metamorphosis, like the wings with which an
insect is provided after its transformation. In every living organism,
necessity, through tentative effort and selections, thus produces the
possible and requisite organ. In India, five hundred years before our
era, it was Buddhism; in Arabia, six hundred years after our era, it
was Islam; in our western societies it is Christianity. At the present
day, after eighteen centuries on both continents, from the Ural to the
Rocky Mountains, amongst Russian moujiks and American settlers, it
works as formerly with the fishermen of Galilee and in the same way,
in such a way as to substitute for the love of self the love of
others; neither in substance nor in use has any change taken place;
under its Greek, Catholic or Protestant envelope, it is still, for
four hundred millions of human beings, the spiritual means, the great,
indispensable pair of wings by which man rises upward above himself,
above his groveling existence and his limited horizons, leading him on
through patience, hope and resignation to serenity, and beyond to
temperance, purity, goodness, and self-devotion and self-sacrifice.
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