Well, that would be us, then, wouldn't it? We might nerve ourselves up to die for a glorious cause, but...
How often the priest had heard the same confession--Man was so limited: he hadn't even the ingenuity to invent a new vice: the animals knew as much. It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt. (Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory, 1940.)
Other quotes from that book of Greene's. He has been compared to another Catholic writer, Flannery O'Connor, for his unflinching look at the evil of humankind while seeing the operation of grace underneath. And just plain writing compellingly and artfully while doing it.
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