:She found it inconceivable that a supposedly good Christian could say such thing.
"Scum of the earth? Really?"
I said, "Now, wait a minute. He might have been telling the truth."
She'd looked at me in shock. I hurried to respond.
"Consider it for a minute. What if those men in that jail were every bit as bad as the chaplain said? What if they were the worst of criminals, guilty of horrific crimes?"
Her face began to alter.
"Well, if they're all that bad, then why is she going in there in the first place?"
"Look, this is one element of Christianity most people fail to recognize. Jesus Christ didn't just get a papercut to redeem us from our sins. He died a bloody awful death, the worst that could be devised at the time.
Why? We've become monstrous in sin. he didn't die for the forgivable sins. He died for the unforgivable sins. He died for us after we'd become monstrous."It took her a little while, but then she began to appreciate the point.
Chesterton
said it all much more elegantly, of course.“...We have to touch such men, not with a bargepole, but with a benediction,” [Father Brown] 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 night, 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 Chief Mourner of Marne," The Innocence of Father Brown
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