n since he
came to the parish. I'll go to yourself."

"But," I said, fearing that she had still some dread of me that might
interfere with the integrity of her confession, "you know I have a bad
tongue--"

"Never mind," she said, "if you have. Sure they say your bark is worse
than your bite."

And so, then and there, in the gloom of that winter's night, I heard her
tale of anguish and sorrow; and whilst I thanked God for this, His sheep
that was lost, I went deeper down than ever into the valleys of
humiliation and self-reproach: "Caritas erga homines, sicut caritas Dei
erga nos."[5] Here was my favorite text, here my sum total of
speculative philosophy. I often preached it to others, even to Father
Letheby, when he came complaining of the waywardness of this imaginative
and fickle people. "If God, from on high, tolerates the unspeakable
wickedness of the world,--if He calmly looks down upon the frightful
holocaust of iniquity that steams up before His eyes from the cities and
towns and hamlets of the world,--if He tolerates the abomination of
paganism, and the still worse, because conscious, wickedness of the
Christian world, why should we be fretful and impatient? And if Christ
was so gentle and so tender towards these foul, ill-smelling, leprous,
and ungrateful Jews, why should we not be tolerant of the venial falls
of the holy people,--the kingly nation?" And I was obliged to confess
that it was all pride,--too much sensitiveness, not to God's dishonor,
but to the stigma and reproach to our own ministrations, that made us
forget our patience and our duty. And often, on Sunday mornings in
winter, when the rain poured down in cataracts, and the village street
ran in muddy torrents, and the eaves dripped in steady sheets of water,
when I stood at my own chapel door and saw poor farmers and laborers,
old women and young girls, drenched through and through, having walked
six miles down from the farthest mountains; and when I saw, as I read
the Acts and the Prayer before Mass, a thick fog of steam rising from
their poor clothes and filling the entire church with a strange incense,
I thought how easy it ought to be for us to condone the thoughtlessness
or the inconsiderate weaknesses of such a people, and to bless God that
our lot was cast amongst them. I heard, with deeper contrition than
hers, the sins of that poor outcast; for every reproach she addressed to
me I heard echoed from the recesses of that silent tabernac