Self-love and attachment to the temporal and vain are the fruits of self-deception, blindness, and spiritual death. Self-love is a perverted love for oneself. This love is insane and pernicious. The self-loving, addicted to vain and transitory things, to sinful pleasures, is an enemy to himself. He is a suicide: thinking to love himself and please himself, he hates and destroys himself, kills himself with eternal death.

Let us look around, distracted, befogged, deceived by vanity! Let us come to our senses, intoxicated with vanity, deprived of correct self-conception by it! let us cope with the experiments that are constantly being performed before our eyes. That which is done before us will certainly be done to us.

Did he who spent his whole life in earning honors, did he take them with him into eternity? Had he not left here the high-sounding titles, the insignia, all the splendor with which he surrounded himself? Did not only man go into eternity with his deeds, with the qualities he had acquired during his earthly life?

He who has used his life to acquire wealth, who has accumulated a great deal of money, who has acquired vast expanses of land for his possession, who has established various institutions that give him an abundant income, who has lived in palaces shining with gold and marble, who has ridden in magnificent chariots and horses, has he taken this into eternity? No! He left everything on earth, being satisfied for the last need of the body with the smallest piece of land, which is equally needed, with which all the dead are equally satisfied.

Whoever during his earthly life occupied himself with carnal amusements and pleasures, spent time with friends in games and other amusements, feasted at sumptuous meals, is finally removed by necessity from the usual way of life. The time of old age, sickness, and after them the hour of separation of the soul from the body. Then it is learned, but too late, that the service of whims and passions is self-deception, that life for the flesh and sin is a life without meaning.

The striving for earthly success is so strange, how monstrous! It searches with frenzy. As soon as he finds it, what he has found is deprived of its value, and the search is aroused with renewed force. It is not satisfied with anything present: it lives only in the future, it craves only what it does not have. Objects of desire attract the heart of the seeker with a dream and the hope of satisfaction: deceived, constantly deceived, he pursues them in the whole field of earthly life, until he is caught up in unexpected death. How and how to explain this seeking, which treats everyone like an inhuman traitor and possesses everyone, captivating everyone? "In our souls there is a desire for infinite blessings. But we have fallen, and the heart, blinded by the fall, seeks in time and on earth that which exists in eternity and in heaven.

The fate that befell my fathers and brethren will befall me also. They died; I will also die. I will leave my cell, I will leave in it my books, and my clothes, and my writing-table, at which I spent many hours; I will leave everything that I needed or thought to need during my earthly life. They will carry my body out of these cells, in which I live, as it were, on the threshold of another life and country; they will carry out my body and commit it to the earth, which was the beginning of the human body. Exactly the same thing will befall you, brethren, who read these lines. You also will die: you will leave all earthly things on earth; with your souls alone enter into eternity.

The human soul acquires qualities corresponding to its activity. As the mirror depicts the objects against which it will be placed, so the soul is imprinted by impressions according to its occupations and deeds, according to its surroundings. In an insensible mirror, images disappear when objects move away from the mirror; impressions remain in the verbal soul. They can be erased and replaced by others, but this requires both labor and time. The impressions that constitute the property of the soul at the hour of its death remain its property forever, serve as a pledge either of its eternal bliss or of its eternal misery.

You cannot serve God and mammon,[58] said the Saviour to fallen men, revealing to men the state into which they had been brought by the fall. In this way, the doctor will tell the patient the state into which he has been brought by the disease and which the patient himself cannot understand. Because of our spiritual disorder, we need timely self-denial and renunciation of the world for salvation. No one can serve as two masters: he loves the one and hates the other: or he holds on to the one, and begins to neglect the others.

Experiments constantly confirm the validity of the view of the moral morbidity of people, which was expressed by the all-holy Physician in the words we have quoted, which we have said with decisive definiteness: the satisfaction of vain and sinful desires is always followed by an infatuation with them; Infatuation is followed by captivity, mortification for all that is spiritual. Those who allowed themselves to follow their desires and carnal wisdom were carried away by them, enslaved to them, forgot God and eternity, wasted their earthly life in vain, perished eternal perdition.

It is not possible to fulfill one's own will and the will of God together: from the fulfillment of the former, the fulfillment of the latter is defiled, made unseemly. Thus fragrant, precious myrrh loses its dignity from the insignificant admixture of stench. Only then, declares God through the great Prophet, will you tear down the good earth, when you will voluntarily listen to Me. But if you do not will, you will listen to Me below, you will gird the sword: for this is the mouth of the Lord.

It is not possible to acquire the mind of God by abiding in carnal wisdom. The wisdom of the flesh, said the Apostle, is death. Carnal wisdom is enmity against God: for it does not obey the law of God, for it can do less. What is carnal wisdom? A way of thinking that has arisen from the state into which men have been brought by the fall, directing them to act on earth as if they were eternal on it, exalting all that is perishable and temporary, despising God and everything pertaining to pleasing God, and depriving men of salvation.

Let us renounce our souls, according to the will of the Saviour, in order to gain our souls! Let us voluntarily renounce the vicious state into which they have been brought by their voluntary renunciation of God, in order to receive from God the holy state of renewed human nature by God incarnate! Let us replace our will and the will of the demons, to which our will has submitted and with which our will has merged, with the will of God, announced to us in the Gospel; the wisdom of the flesh, common to fallen spirits and men, let us replace with the mind of God, shining from the Gospel.

Let us renounce our possessions in order to acquire the ability to follow our Lord Jesus Christ! The correct concept of material possessions is provided by the Gospel [62]; but when it is delivered, then the human mind involuntarily realizes all its correctness. Earthly possessions are not our property, as those who have never thought about this subject mistakenly think: otherwise they would always be and would forever remain ours. It passes from hand to hand and thus testifies to itself that it is given only for support. Property belongs to God; A person can only be a temporary manager of property. A faithful steward faithfully fulfills the will of the one who entrusted him with the order. And we, administering the material property entrusted to us for a period of time, strive to manage it according to the will of God. Let us not use it as a means of satisfying our whims and passions, as a means of our eternal perdition: let us use it for the benefit of humanity, so much in need, suffering so much, let us use it as a means of our salvation. Those who desire Christian perfection completely abandon earthly acquisition [63]; those who wish to be saved must give alms as much as they can [64] and refrain from abusing their acquisitiveness.