or love is evil. This is the true principle.

902

All religions and sects in the world have had natural reason for a
guide. Christians alone have been constrained to take their rules from
without themselves, and to acquaint themselves with those which Jesus
Christ bequeathed to men of old to be handed down to true believers.
This constraint wearies these good Fathers. They desire, like other
people, to have liberty to follow their own imaginations. It is in vain
that we cry to them, as the prophets said to the Jews of old: "Enter
into the Church; acquaint yourselves with the precepts which the men of
old left to her, and follow those paths." They have answered like the
Jews: "We will not walk in them; but we will follow the thoughts of our
hearts"; and they have said, "We will be as the other nations."[373]

903

They make a rule of exception.

Have the men of old given absolution before penance? Do this as
exceptional. But of the exception you make a rule without exception, so
that you do not even want the rule to be exceptional.

904

_On confessions and absolutions without signs of regret._

God regards only the inward; the Church judges only by the outward. God
absolves as soon as He sees penitence in the heart; the Church when she
sees it in works. God will make a Church pure within, which confounds,
by its inward and entirely spiritual holiness, the inward impiety of
proud sages and Pharisees; and the Church will make an assembly of men
whose external manners are so pure as to confound the manners of the
heathen. If there are hypocrites among them, but so well disguised that
she does not discover their venom, she tolerates them; for, though they
are not accepted of God, whom they cannot deceive, they are of men, whom
they do deceive. And thus she is not dishonoured by their conduct, which
appears holy. But you want the Church to judge neither of the inward,
because that belongs to God alone, nor of the outward, because God
dwells only upon the inward; and thus, taking away from her all choice
of men, you retain in the Church the most dissolute, and those who
dishonour her so greatly, that the synagogues of the Jews and sects of
philosophers would have banished them as unworthy, and have abhorred
them as impious.

905

The easiest conditions to live in according to the world are the most
difficult to live in according to God, and vice versa. Nothing is so
difficult according to the world as th