"
"These are your Eminence's opinions?" said Moretti.
"Most assuredly! Are they not yours?"
Moretti smiled coldly.
"No. I confess they are not! I am a faithful servant of the Church;
and the Church is a system of moral government in which, if the
slightest laxity be permitted, the whole fabric is in danger--"
"A house of cards then, which a breath may blow down!" interposed
"Gys Grandit," otherwise Cyrillon Vergniaud, "Surely an unstable
foundation for the everlasting ethics of Christ!"
"I did not speak to you, sir," said Moretti, turning upon him
angrily.
"I know you did not. I spoke to you," answered the young man coolly,
"I have as much right to speak to you, as you have to speak to me,
or to be silent--if you choose. You say the Church is a system of
moral government. Well, look back on the past, and see what it has
done in the way of governing. In the very earliest days of
Christianity, when men were simple and sincere, when their faith in
the power of the Divine things was strong and pure, the Church was
indeed a safeguard, and a powerful restraint on man's uneducated
licentiousness and inherent love of strife. But when the lust of
gain began to creep like a fever into the blood of those with whom
worldly riches should be as nothing compared to the riches of the
mind, the heart, and the spirit, then the dryrot of hypocrisy set
in--then came craftiness, cruelty, injustice, and pitilessness, and
such grossness of personal conduct as revolts even the soul of an
admitted sinner.
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