"In Jesus' first sermon he did not say to men, Love one another (he gave this instruction to his disciples later on), but he preached like John the Baptist the necessity for repentance, Mєτάνοєττє, change your conception of life or you will all perish. The object of your life cannot consist in the pursuit of your own personal welfare or that of your family or your country because this happiness can be attained only at the expense of your neighbor. Understand that the aim of your life can but consist in the accomplishment of the will of Him who gave you that life and who exacts from you, not the pursuit of your personal interests, but the accomplishment of his purpose: the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth. Mєτάνοєττє change your conception of life or you will all perish. Jesus said this two thousand years ago: and it is manifest to-day by all the inconsistencies and evils that are visited upon those who have not heard or accepted the conception of life he proposed. And the alternative is the same. The only difference is that it is more imperative to-day. If it was possible two thousand years ago, at the time of the Roman Empire, even during Charles-Quint, or before the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, not to see the futility, I will even say the absurdity, of attempts made to achieve personal happiness, of the family, or the country by a struggle against those who are seeking the same goal, this illusion has become wholly impossible in our age for every one who will pause for only a moment in his labor and reflect on his condition and the condition of the world around him, and what it ought to be. So that if I was called upon to give a unique counsel, one that I would consider the most beneficial to the people of the present siecle I would say to them only one thing: 'In the name of God stop for a moment, cease your toil, gaze around you, think of what you are and what you should be, think of the Ideal.' . . . The ideal in geometry is the perfectly straight line and the circle of which all the rays are equal; in science, the pure truth; in morality, the perfect virtue . . . The Christian ideal has been before us for eighteen centuries; it shines to-day with such an intensity that we must make a great effort not to see that all our evils come from not accepting it as our guide. . . . if people would only reflect they would involuntarily be brought to embrace the conception of life given by Christianity— conception so natural, so simple, and responding so completely to the requirements of the mind and heart of humanity, that it would produce, in the understanding of those who would be liberated from the entanglements in which they are held by the complications of their business and the business of others, a change, a peace which passeth all comprehension.
"The festival has been spread for eighteen hundred years; but one cannot come because he has land to buy, another because he is married, a third because he must try his oxen, a fourth because he is constructing a railroad, a manufactory, a missionary work, a seat in parliament, a bank, a scientific, artistic or literary work. Few have leisure to follow the counsel of Jesus: to look around him, to think of the results of his labor and demand, Who am I? Why am I? Is it possible that the power which has produced me with my reason and my desire to love and be loved has only done it in order to deceive me by allowing me to imagine that the end and object of my life is the attainment of my personal good, that it belongs to me and I have the right to dispose of it the same as other creatures around me, as I please? I arrive finally at the conviction that this cannot be achieved, and the greater my efforts to attain it the more I find it in contradiction with my reason and my desire to love and be loved, and the more I find disenchantments and sufferings. And is it not more probable, not having come into this world spontaneously but by the will of Him who gave me my reason and my desire to love and be loved, and that they have been given me solely for a guide in the accomplishment of that will?
"Once let this µetavola accomplish in the thoughts of men, a conception of the life pagan and egotist replaced by the Christian conception, the love of your neighbor will become more natural than the present struggle and egotism. Once let the love of his neighbor become natural to man, the new conditions of a Christian life will form spontaneously as a liquid impregnated with salt will form crystals when you cease to agitate it.
