The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves—say rather, loved in spite of ourselves; this conviction the blind have. In their calamity, to be served is to be caressed. Are they deprived of anything? No. Light is not lost where love enters. And what a love! A love wholly founded in purity. There is no blind

“Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.”

You see nothing, but you feel yourself adored. It is a paradise of darkness.

“I didn’t believe it could be so monstrous. It’s wrong to be so absorbed in divine law as not to perceive human law. Death belongs to God alone. By what right do men touch that unknown thing?”

She had made a mistake, but, deep down, we know she was modest and virtuous. She had a vague feeling of being on the brink of danger, of slipping into the streets. She had to have courage; she had it, and continued bravely.

A saint addicted to abnegation is a dangerous neighbor; he is very likely to infect you with an incurable poverty, a stiffening of the articulations necessary to advancement, and, in fact, more renunciation than you would like; and men flee from this contagious virtue. Hence the isolation of Monseigneur Bienvenu.

To destroy abuses is not enough; habits must also be changed.

As his growing fortune gave him more leisure, it seemed that he took advantage of it to cultivate his mind. Since he had been at Montreuil-sur-mer, it was noted that from year to year his language became more polished, more carefully chosen, and gentler.

He sought out funerals as others seek out christenings. The bereavement and the misfortune of others attracted him, because of his great kindness; he mingled with friends in mourning, with families dressing in black, with the priests bereaved around a corpse. He seemed glad to take as text for his thoughts the funeral psalms, full of the vision of