"Man has upon him the flesh which is at once his burden and his
temptation. He carries it with him and yields to it. He must watch,
restrain, and repress it, and only obey it in the last extremity. In
this obedience there may still be a fault: but the fault thus committed
is venial. It is a fall, but a fall on the knees, which may end in
prayer. To be a saint is the exception, to be a just man is the rule.
Err, fail, sin, but be just. The least possible amount of sin is the
law of man: no sin at all is the dream of angels. All that is earthly
is subjected to sin, for sin is a gravitation."
When he saw everybody cry out and grow indignant, all of a sudden, he
would say with a smile, "Oh! oh, it seems as if this is a great crime
which all the world is committing. Look at the startled hypocrites,
hastening to protest and place themselves under cover."
He was indulgent to the women and the poor on whom the weight of
human society presses. He would say, "The faults of women, children,
servants, the weak, the indigent, and the ignorant are the fault of
husbands, fathers, masters, the strong, the rich, and the learned." He
also said, "Teach the ignorant as much as you possibly can: society is
culpable for not giving instruction gratis, and is responsible for the
night it produces. This soul is full of darkness, and sin is committed,
but the guilty person is not the man who commits the sin, but he who
produces the darkness."
As we see, he had a strange manner, peculiarly his own, of judging
things. I suspect that he obtained it from the Gospels. He one day
heard in a drawing-room the story of a trial which was shortly to take
place. A wretched man, through love of a woman and a child he had by
her, having exhausted his resources, coined false money, which at
that period was an offence punished by death. The woman was arrested
while issuing the first false piece manufactured by the man. She was
detained, but there was no proof against her. She alone could accuse
her lover and ruin him by confessing. She denied. They pressed her, but
she adhered to her denial. Upon this, the attorney for the crown had
an idea: he feigned infidelity on the lover's part, and contrived, by
cleverly presenting the woman with fragments of letters, to persuade
her that she had a rival, and that the man was deceiving her. Then,
exasperated by jealousy, she denounced her lover, confessed everything,
proved everything. The man was ruined, and would shortly be tried with
his accomplice at Aix. The story was told, and everybody was delighted
at the magistrate's cleverness. By bringing jealousy into play he
brought out the truth through passion, and obtained justice through
revenge. The Bishop listened to all this in silence, and when it was
ended he asked: "Where will this man and woman be tried?" "At the
assizes." Then he continued, "And where will the attorney for the crown
be tried?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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