dminister it. One
would say it was angry at having got into the wrong box and avenged
itself by going into voluntary paralysis when possessed by one who was
neither a sharper nor an ass.

It acted still more strangely when by some extraordinary chance it
strayed into the home of a poor man. Immediately it defiled the clean,
debauched the chaste, and, acting simultaneously on the body and the
soul, it insinuated into its possessor a base selfishness, an ignoble
pride; it suggested that he spend for himself alone; it made the humble
man a boor, the generous man a skinflint. In one second it changed every
habit, revolutionized every idea, metamorphosed the most deeply rooted
passions.

It was the instigator and vigilant accomplice of all the important sins.
If it permitted one of its detainers to forget himself and bestow a boon
it awakened hatred in the recipient, it replaced avarice with
ingratitude and re-established equilibrium so that the account might
balance and not one sin of commission be wanting.

But it reached its real height of monstrosity when, concealing its
identity under an assumed name, it entitled itself capital. Then its
action was not limited to individual incitation to theft and murder but
extended to the entire human race. With one word capital decided
monopolies, erected banks, cornered necessities, and, if it wished,
caused thousands of human beings to starve to death.

And it grew and begot itself while slumbering in a safe, and the Two
Worlds adored it on bended knee, dying of desire before it as before a
God.

Well! money was the devil, otherwise its mastery of souls was
inexplicable. And how many other mysteries, equally unintelligible, how
many other phenomena were there to make a reflective man shudder!

"But," thought Durtal, "seeing that there are so many more things
betwixt heaven and earth than are dreamed of in anybody's philosophy,
why not believe in the Trinity? Why reject the divinity of Christ? It is
no strain on one to admit the _Credo quia absurdum_ of Saint Augustine
and Tertullian and say that if the supernatural were comprehensible it
would not be supernatural, and that precisely because it passes the
faculties of man it is divine.

"And--oh, to hell with it! What's it all about, anyway?"

And again, as so often when he had found himself before this
unbridgeable gulf between reason and belief, he recoiled from the leap.

Well, his thoughts had strayed far from the sub