Love is a grace that loves God for Himself, and our neighbors for God. The consideration of God’s goodness and bounty, the experience of those profitable and excellent emanations from Him, may be and most commonly are, the first motive of our love; but when we are once entered, and have tasted the goodness of God, we loved the spring for its own excellency, passing from passion to reason, from thanksgiving to adoring, from sense to spirit, from considering ourselves to an union with God: and this is the image and little representation of heaven; it is beatitude in picture, or rather the infancy and beginnings of glory.
Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living.