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In The Chief Mourner of Marne, the local aristocracy is thrilled that the upright Marquis of Marne has returned 30 years after killing, with immediate remorse, his scoundrel brother in a duel, but they are upset that the Marquis has entered upon a monastic lifestyle in his castle, with his sole visitor a Catholic priest, Father Brown.
"It's about all the Christian charity you'll ever get out of these priests," cried [Sir John] Cockspur bitterly. "That's their only idea of pardoning a poor fellow for a piece of folly; to wall him up alive and starve him to death with fasts and penances and pictures of hell-fire."
After heaping such abuse upon Father Brown, the upstanding citizens sing a different tune when they find out that the Marquis is none other than the scoundrel brother, who faked his own death and killed his good brother when no one was looking. Who could forgive such a heinous criminal?
"There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over.
"There is," said Father Brown dryly; "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity ... For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don't really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don't regard as crimes, but rather as conventions ... You forgive because there isn't anything to be forgiven."
"But, hang it all," cried Mallow, "you don't expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing like this?"
"No," said the priest; "but we have to be able to pardon it."
"We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction," he said. "We have to say the word that will save them from hell. We alone are left to deliver them from despair when your human charity deserts them. Go on your own primrose path pardoning all your favourite vices and being generous to your fashionable crimes; and leave us in the darkness, vampires of the nights, to console those who really need consolation; who do things really indefensible, things that neither the world nor they themselves can defend; and none but a priest will pardon. Leave us with the men who commit the mean and revolting and real crimes; mean as St. Peter when the cock crew, and yet the dawn came."
"The dawn," repeated Mallow doubtfully. "You mean hope—for him?
"Yes," replied the other. "Let me ask you one question. You are great ladies and men of honour and secure of yourselves ... You say you could not commit so base a crime. Could you confess so base a crime?"
From The Oracle of the Dog:
"Yes," said Father Brown, "I always like a dog, so long as he isn't spelt backwards."
Speaking to Fiennes:
"The dog had everything to with [the murder]," said Father Brown, "as you'd have found out if you'd only treated the dog as a dog, and not as God Almighty judging the souls of men ... The truth is, I happen to be awfully fond of dogs. And it seemed to me that in all this lurid halo of dog superstitions nobody was really thinking about the poor dog at all ... [I] sometimes fancy, for instance, that you are too clever to understand animals. Sometimes you are too clever to understand men, especially when they act almost as simply as animals. Animals are very literal; they live in a world of truisms. Take this case: a dog barks at a man and a man runs away from a dog. Now you do not seem to be quite simple enough to see the fact: that the dog barked because he disliked the man and the man fled because he was frightened of the dog. They had no other motives and they needed none; but you must read psychological mysteries into it and suppose the dog had super-normal vision, and was a mysterious mouthpiece of doom. You must suppose the man was running away, not from the dog but the hangman."
and again, later:
"The dog could almost have told you the story, if he could talk," said the priest. "All I complain of is that because he couldn't talk, you made up his story for him, and made him talk with the tongues of men and angels. It's part of something I've noticed more and more in the modern world ... It's drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it's coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition." He stood up abruptly, his face heavy with a sort of frown, and went on talking almost as if he were alone. "It's the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can't see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there's a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery, and a pig is a mascot and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menangerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words: 'He was made Man'."
[Fiennes] got up with a little embarrassment, almost as if he had overheard a soliloquy. He called to the dog and left the room with vague but breezy farewells. But he had to call the dog twice, for the dog had remained behind quite motionless for a moment, looking up steadily at Father Brown as the wolf looked at St. Francis.