The poor man who is sober, chaste, simple and contented because he lacks means and occasions for anything else, is inclined to look for a recompense in pleasures which do not cost money, and as it were for a revenge in a spiritual superiority where prosperous people cannot compete with him. But often his virtues come from his impotence or from his ignorance; he does not turn from the right course—he cannot afford to do so—he does not pile up treasure because he possesses only the strictly necessary; he is not drunken and licentious because wine-sellers and women of the streets give no credit. His life, often hard, servile, dark, redeems his faults. And his suffering forces him to lift his eyes towards Heaven in search of consolation. We do so little for the poor that we have no right to judge them. As they are, abandoned by their brothers, kept far from those who could speak to their hearts, avoided by those who shrink from the proximity of their sweaty bodies, excluded from those worlds of intelligence and the arts which might make their poverty more endurable, the poor are, in the universal wretchedness of mankind, the least impure. If they were more loved, they would be better men. How can those who have left them alone in their poverty have the heart to condemn them? Jesus loved the poor; He loved them for the compassion which He felt for them; He loved them because He felt them nearer to His soul, more prepared to understand Him than other men. He loved them because they constantly gave Him the happiness of service, of giving bread to the hungry, strength to the weak, hope to the unhappy. Jesus loved the poor because He saw that if they were justly treated they would be the most legitimate inhabitants of the Kingdom. He loved the poor because they rendered the renunciation of the rich easier by the stimulus of charity; but most of all He loved the poor men who had been rich and who for the love of the Kingdom had become poor. Their renunciation was the greatest act of faith in His promise. They had given that which considered absolutely is nothing, but in the eyes of the world is everything, for the certainty of sharing in a more perfect life. They had been obliged to conquer in themselves one of the most profoundly rooted instincts of man. Jesus, born a poor man among the poor, for the poor, never left his brothers. He gave to them the fructifying abundance of His divine property. But in His heart He sought the poor man who had not always been poor, the rich man ready to strip himself for His love. He sought him, perhaps He never found him. But He felt this longed-for, unknown brother man tenderly nearer to his heart than all the docile seekers who crowded about Him. THE DEVIL’S DUNG