“Mr. Samgrass told me he was drinking too much all last term.”
“Yes, but not like that – never before.”
“Then why now? here? with us? All night I have been thinking and praying and wondering what I was to say to him, and now, this morning, he isn’t here at all. That was cruel of him, leaving without a word. I don’t want him to be ashamed – it’s being ashamed that makes it all so wrong of him.”
“He’s ashamed of being unhappy”, I said.” (131)
“When I was a girl we comparatively poor, but still much richer than most of the world, and when I married I became very rich. It used to worry me, and I thought it wrong to have so many beautiful things when others had nothing. Now I realize that it is possible for the rich to sin by coveting the privileges of the poor. The poor have always been the favourites of God and his saints, but I believe that it is one of the special achievements of Grace to sanctify the whole of life, riches included. Wealth in pagan Rome was necessarily something cruel; it’s not any more”
I said something about a camel and the eye of a needle and she rose happily to the point.
“But of course” she said, “it’s very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in lives of the saints. It’s all part of the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side, of religion.” (122-123)
[Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Penguin, 1960]
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