from production.  Their contention is that a man should work more than is required for himself, that he should produce more than is required for his own necessities.  In this surplus lies their wealth, and to obtain it they have invented a monstrous and inhuman morality, that by means of religion and even of philosophy, glorifies work, saying that work is the greatest of all virtues and idleness the source of all vices.  And this makes me ask, if idleness is a vice in the poor, how is it that among the rich it is counted as a sign of distinction and even of elevation of mind?  And if work is the greatest of all virtues, how is it that capitalists endeavour to amass wealth in order to free themselves and their descendants from the practice of so great a virtue?  Why is it that this society which exalts work with every sort of poetical conception relegates the worker to the lowest rank?  Why do they receive with greater enthusiasm a soldier who has fought, more or less, than an aged workman who has spent seventy years working without any one praising him or being grateful to him for so much virtue?”

The servants of the Cathedral nodded their heads, assenting to what fell from the master; they looked up to him as simple people always look up to those who come down to them as apostles of a new idea.

The continual friction with Gabriel had caused to germinate in their minds, stunted by the traditional atmosphere, a growth of ideas, like the microscopic mosses the winter rains had formed on the granite buttresses of the church.  Hitherto they had lived resigned to the life that surrounded them, moving like somnambulists on the undecided boundary which separates soul from instinct, but the unexpected presence of that fugitive from social battles was the impulse that launched them into full thought, walking tentatively and with no other light than that of their master.

“You,” went on Gabriel, “do not suffer from the slavery of work like those who live among modern factories.  The Church does not require great exertions from you, and the service of God does not destroy you from over-fatigue, though it kills you with hunger.  There exists a monstrous inequality between the salaries of those down below who sit in the choir and sing and what you earn, who lend to worship all the strength of your arms.  You will not die of fatigue, it is true; many a workman in the towns would laugh at the lightness of your duties; but you languish from poverty.  I see in this cloister the same anaemic children that I saw in workmen’s slums, I see what you eat and what you are paid.  The Church pays its servants as in the days of faith; she believes that we still live in the times when whole towns would throw themselves into the work with the hope of gaining heaven, and would help to raise cathedrals without any more positive recompense than the workman’s stew and the blessing of the bishop; and all this while, you, beings of flesh who require nourishment, deceive your stomachs and those of your wives and children with potatoes and bread, while down below those wooden images are covered with pearls and gold in senseless profusion, and without its ever occurring to you to ask yourselves why the idols who have no wants should be so rich, while you are unable to satisfy your own and live in misery.”