and daily experience. the two elders who falsely accused Susanna, that chaste matron would have been stoned by the people as a guilty adulteress. Joseph languished in prison under the charge of having attempted the chastity of his master’s wife, although his only crime was that he resisted her wicked solicitations; if God had not saved him, he would have perhaps died in prison as a criminal. But, alas! how many there are who are publicly decried by a whole city, although they are as innocent as Joseph and Susanna were of the crime of which they are accused, and they never have an opportunity of regaining their good name! And how many are not deprived of their employment, their property, their honor, through ill-founded suspicion, or envious and false accusations, that they never have a chance of refuting? There are few who have not to suffer from the evil tongues of those who envy and hate them and try to blacken their good name behind their backs in all sorts of ways. Nearly every one measures others by his own passions and imagination; the words that are spoken are misinterpreted and taken in an evil sense. And there are some who, if they cannot find anything blameworthy in the outward actions of others, wickedly assail their inward intention, of which they know nothing. Nor are private individuals the only ones who have to suffer from this; whole communities and nations lose their good name through the ill-conduct of some of their members. All the opponents of our holy faith have always looked on the popes as so many Antichrists; they say that our clergy are immoral, wicked, hypocritical, and avaricious in a shameful degree. All our convents they consider as houses of ill-fame, our churches as synagogues, our whole religion as a mass of mummeries and idolatry.
To their great joy they will receive back their injured honor before the whole world. Here again we see how necessary it is that there should be a time in which all these calumnies and falsehoods shall be refuted, and that too publicly, so that all those innocent and injured servants of God may recover their lost honor before the world, and the frightful perversion of truth resulting from wicked tongues be put to rights. Yes, my dear brethren, this time shall come; the Prophet David assures us that “the Lord will not leave the rod of sinners upon the lot of the just.”[1] “Now indeed,” says St. Augustine commenting on this text, “the just have something to endure, and the wicked domineer over them; but shall it always be the case that the wicked command the righteous? Not
- ↑ Non relinquet Dominus virgam peccatorum super sortem justorum.—Ps. cxxiv. 3.
