human
Ah! they are happy!
gpt
Too happy.
human
Yes, it is true we enter here to do penance, to mortify ourselves, and we have hardly begun to suffer when God consoles us. He is so good that He Himself wishes to deceive Himself about our merits. If at certain moments He allows the Demon to persecute us, He gives us in exchange so much happiness that there is no proportion preserved between the recompense and the sorrow. Sometimes when I think of it, I ask myself how there still subsists that equilibrium that nuns and monks are charged to maintain, since neither of us suffer enough to neutralize the repeated sins of towns?
gpt
The world does not even conceive that the austerity of the abbeys can profit it. The doctrine of mystical compensation escapes it entirely. It cannot represent to itself that the substitution of the innocent for the guilty is necessary when to suffer merited punishment is concerned. Nor does it explain to itself any more that in wishing to suffer for others, monks turn aside the wrath of heaven, and establish a solidarity in the good which is a counter-weight against the federation of evil. God knows, moreover, with what cataclysms the unconscious world would be menaced, if in consequence of a sudden disappearance of all the cloisters, the equilibrium which saves it were broken.