One thing impressed my own mind most peculiarly when the Lord was first opening my eyes_I
never found Christ doing a single thing for Himself. Here is an immense principle! There was not
one act in all Christ’s life done to serve or to please Himself. An unbroken stream of blessed,
perfect, unfailing love flowed from Him, no matter what the contradiction of sinners_one
amazing and unwavering testimony of love and sympathy and help; but it was ever others, and not
Himself, that were comforted. Now the world’s whole principle is self, doing well for itself (Psa.
49:18). Men know that it is upon the energy of selfishness they have to depend. Every one that
knows anything at all of the world knows this. Without it the world could not go on. What is the
world’s honor? Self. What its wealth? Self. What is advancement in the world? Self. They are but
so many forms of the same thing; the principle that animates the individual man in each is the
spirit of self-seeking. The business of the world is the seeking of self, and the pleasures of the
world are selfish pleasures. They are troublesome pleasures too, for we cannot escape from a
world where God has said, "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the
ground." Toil for self is irksome; but suppose a man finds out at length that the busy seeking of
self is trouble and weariness, and having procured the means of living without it, gives it up; what
then? He just adopts another form of the same spirit of self, and turns to selfish ease.

I am not now speaking of vice and gross sin (of course every one will allow that to be opposite
to the spirit of Christ), but of the whole course of the world. Take the world’s decent moral man:
is he an "epistle of Christ"? Is there in him a single motive like Christ’s? He may do the same
things; he may be a carpenter as Christ was (Mark 6:3); but he has not one thought in common
with Christ. As to the outside the world goes on with its religion and its philanthropy; it does
good, builds its hospitals, feeds the hungry, clothes the naked, and the like; but its inward springs
of action are not Christ’s. Every motive that governed Christ all the way along is not that which
governs men; and the motives which keep the world going are not those which were found in
Christ at all.

(From Collected Writings, Vol. 12.)