t deserve our contempt
and hatred. For there are two qualities in the truths of our religion, a
divine beauty which compels our love, and a holy majesty that demands
our veneration; and there are two qualities in error, the impiety which
makes it horrible, and the impertinence which renders it absurd.

Do not hope, therefore, to persuade the world that it is unworthy of
Christians to deal with errors as absurdities, since this method has
been common to the early fathers of the church, and is authorised by
Holy Scriptures, by the example of the greatest saints, and even by that
of God himself. For do we not see that God at the same time hates and
despises sinners in such a degree that at the hour of their death, when
their condition is at its saddest and most deplorable, the divine wisdom
is said to unite mockery and laughter with the vengeance and fury which
condemns them to perpetual torments.

Nay, it is worthy of our notice that in the first words which God spake
to man after the fall the fathers of the church have discovered a tone
of mockery, a stinging irony. After Adam had disobeyed, in the hope that
the devil had given that he would then be made like a God, it appears
from Scripture that God's punishment made him subject to death, and that
after having reduced Adam to the miserable condition which his sin had
deserved, God mocked him with words of piercing irony, saying: "There is
the man who has become as one of us."

You see, therefore, that mockery is sometimes designed to turn men from
their follies, and is then an act of righteousness. Thus Jeremiah says
that the deeds of the foolish are worthy of laughter because of their
vanity. And, again, St. Augustine says that the wise laugh at the
foolish because they are wise, but in virtue not of their own wisdom,
but of the divine wisdom which will mock at the death of the wicked.

What? Must we call in Scripture and tradition to prove that cutting down
one's enemy from behind, and in an ambush is a treacherous murder? Or
that giving a present of money to secure an ecclesiastical benefice is
to purchase it? Of course, there are teachings which deserve our
contempt, and can only be dealt with by mockery. Are you, fathers, to be
permitted to teach that it is lawful to slay in order to avoid a blow
and an affront, yet are we to be forbidden to refute publicly so grave
an error? Are you to be at liberty to say that a judge may
conscientiously retain a bribe given h