"You say truly that it is easier for a camel - but what is it to me if the rich damn themselves? I am not their chaplain or their confessor! The rich take the earth and leave heaven for the poor. And it is a great lie, for the poor are damned also, a thousand times more, for there are a thousand times more poor than rich. The poor on earth are the image of Jesus Christ and that image is defiled in them, they sully and trample it, and they are wretched in this life only to be still more wretched in the next."
[...]
"You speak harshly, brother," he [Father Albert] said. "To those who are wretched on earth, God has promised forgiveness."
"Listen to me, father. God never promised any such thing, not to anyone. It may not be easy for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, but it is not all that much easier for a mouse. You and your like are pleased to look on the poor as a flock of sheep. You think they are not given to all the same vices as the rich, that their blood is not as hot or their heads as hard, or their hearts as violent, and that they have only to let themselves be shorn and fleeced and let the lords take their daughters and the judges hang them for a stolen ewe. The wicked judge is damned, true, but the man who is hanged for stealing a sheep does not die a Christian death and he shall be damned as well.
"The truth is that the poor are as ravening wolves, as cunning as foxes and as lecherous as he-goats. I do not say this of all the poor but of a great many of them, for poverty never made any man better. It is easy not to tell lies when you are not afraid, not to steal when you are not hungry. But the person who acquires the habit of lying and stealing becomes like a beast.
I have seen mother sell their daughters. I have seen mothers abandon their newborn babies in the field. I have seen men mutilate their children to make them better beggars. I have seen sons leave their aged fathers to starve because they themselves were hungry, and ten lepers band together to abduct and rape a girl, and great oafs steal alms from the blind, and cripples torture children and bind them with chains to stop them running off with the takings. I have seen [...]
"Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go thereat. And for this the rich are surely to blame and they shall answer for it, but no man has more than one soul, and if the soul of a poor man is lost it matters little to him that the rich man's is lost also. For today it is too late. It is no longer bread which the poor lack."
Bookmarks