Difficult enough, one thinks, must be the task
of ascertaining and weighing the amount of a
penitent's moral guilt, of gauging the intensity of
the temptations to which he has yielded, and of
sounding the depths of his contrition! "One
point," thought Burns:

  One point must still be greatly dark,
    The moving Why they do it;
  And just as lamely can ye mark,
    How far perhaps they rue it.

But Rome has felt, foreseen, and provided for
this difficulty. She had been quite aware that
it would never do simply to catch a human
heart, strip it naked, and then set a Confessor to
count its pulses, and find out the clue to its
inextricable tangle of winding ways "by the light
of nature!" So she has undertaken to map out
clearly the whole of the mighty maze. All the
complicated possibilities of human failings she
professes to have catalogued, surveyed the
darkest and remotest corners of every heart,
laid down the latitude and longitude of every
spot, and reduced the entire results of her vast
undertaking to an intelligible code of rules.
Huge volumes, and many of them, have been
occupied, as may be supposed, in ascertaining
all the data for this great geographical chart of
the moral world, and duly ticketing every
complication of human action. But, by the labour
of several generations of casuists the great work
has been accomplished; and now, thanks to the
Benedictine monk who has written the book, I
have received from Florence the gist of their
labours, digested into a Manual in the form of
question and answer.

It would be neither uninstructive nor
unamusing to the reader to go through the whole
work as I have done, noting the infallible
tendency of the system to lose sight of sinfulness,
while busying itself in counting up sins and
classing them; and to destroy all action of the
natural conscience of mankind by making the
question, whether and how grievously a man is
sinning, one which can be decided only by
his Confessor. Space and time make it necessary
for me, moreover, to content myself with a
few specimens of the singular results which arise
from this mode of dealing with human conduct.

The counting of sins is sometimes a delicate
operation, and the rules for conducting it lead
to some curious conclusions. It might be
supposed, for instance, that if I were to speak
ill-naturedly of Parson Surtis at Mickleham
Parva, whom I have confessed I dislike, I
should do more wrong than if I were to say
that the French were all—as one of their own
writers said of themof a nature compounded
of the tiger and the monkey. But the rule that
I find in the Manual declares that "the same
action contains as many numerically distinct sins
as there are objects of the action." In the
latter case, therefore, my sin would have to be
multiplied by the total of the French population.
And this especial case of speaking ill of an
entire community is instanced as an example of the
sense of the rule in the Manual before me.

Again, as it is very important to know whether
I have committed one sin or more, and as that
will depend on the number of completed sinful
acts, it becomes necessary to distinguish
carefully where one act ends and another begins.
And as we are in this matter concerned not only
with outward actions, but with those of the
volition, it has been decided by the doctors, and
is set forth in my useful little Manual, that as
often as a change of will occurs, a new act is
entered on. Thus, the hardened thief who
picks a pocket, without any doubt or hesitation
about it, commits one sin. But, the shilly-shally
novice, who ten times makes up his mind to the
deed, and ten times resists the temptation and
abandons the intention, has committed ten sins,
even though he do not put his thought in
execution at last.

In some cases, this counting process necessitates
still more delicate operations of casuistry.
"External acts, or acts externally consummated,"
says the perspicuous author of my
Manual, "are multiplied as many times as the
object of the doer is perfected and completed."
And hence it becomes curiously necessary to
ascertain with accuracy what was the object of
the doer. For, as my author happily and
lucidly exemplifies it, "if a man beats his
enemy without any intention of killing him, he
commits as many sins as he inflicts blows. But
if he beat him with the intention of beating him
to death, he commits one sin only, the blows
having been merely portions of the one object
and act of putting his enemy to death."

If counting sins be found to be sometimes a
delicate and curious operation, the computation
of them by weight is often no less so. Theft,
for instance, is undoubtedly sinful in most cases.
Those in which it is not so, shall be pointed out
presently. But, a most important distinction of
all sins is into "grave" and "venial;" and this,
in the case of theft, I find with some surprise
(always proceeding on the authority of my Manual),
will depend in no wise on the state of the thief's
mind, his degree of ignorance, amount of temptation,
or other such considerations, but simply
on the amount in money value of the things
stolen, varied according to the social status of
the person robbed. From a due consideration
of which circumstances, is deduced the following
very remarkable thieving tariff: Theft from a
pauper will reach "gravity" when it amounts
to the sum of eightpence. (I reduce the sums
in the Tuscan thief's tariff to English money, for
the more ready usefulness of the table.) In
many cases, however, of great destitution in the
person robbed, a smaller sum than eightpence will
make gravity. If the victim be one who gains
his bread by the labour of his hands, from one
and fourpence to two shillings will be about the
mark. If the theft be from a person tolerably
comfortably off, nothing under four and fourpence,
or at the worst under three and eightpence,
need much trouble your conscience.
From a man who may be fairly set down as rich,
a theft will not signify much, unless it reaches
four and eightpence, or at least four shillings.