Naturally it is much more easy to abstain from committing injustice than to repair it after it is done.  It is often very difficult and very painful to face the consequences of our evil ways, especially when all satisfaction is gone and nothing remains but the hard exigencies of duty.  And duty is a thing that it costs very little to shirk when one is already hardened by a habit of injustice.  That is why restitution is so little heard of in the world.  It is a fact to be noted that the Catholic Church is the only religious body that dares to enforce strictly the law of reparation.  Others vaguely hold it, but rarely teach it, and then only in flagrant cases of fraud.  But she allows none of her children to approach the sacraments who has not already repaired, or who does not promise in all sincerity to repair, whatever wrong he may have done to the neighbor.  Employers of Catholic help sometimes feel the effects of this uncompromising attitude of the Church; they are astonished, edified and grateful.

We recall with pleasure an incident of an apostate going about warning people against the turpitudes of Rome and especially against the extortions of her priests through the confessional.  He explained how the benighted papist was obliged under pain of eternal damnation to confess his sins to the priest, and then was charged so much for each fault he had been guilty of.  An incredulous listener wanted to know if he, the speaker, while in the toils of Rome had ever been obliged thus to disgorge in the confessional, and was answered with a triumphant affirmation.  At which the wag hinted that it would be a good thing not to be too outspoken in announcing the fact as his reputation for honesty would be likely to suffer thereby, for he knew, and all Catholics knew, who were those whose purse the confessor pries open.

CHAPTER XCV.  UNDOING THE EVIL.

Whenever a person, through a spirit of Police or grossly culpable negligence, becomes responsible for serious bodily injury sustained by another, he is bound, as far as in him lies, to undo the wrong and repair the injustice committed.  The law of personal rights that forbade him to lay violent hands on another, now commands that the evil be removed by him who placed it.  True, physical pain and tortures cannot be repaired in kind; physical injury and disability are not always susceptible of adequate reparation.  But there is the loss incurred as a result of such disability, and this loss may affect, not one alone, but many.

Death, too, is of course absolutely irreparable.  But the killing of the victim in nowise extinguishes the obligation of reparation.  The principal object is removed; but there remain the loss of wages, the expenses necessitated by illness and death; there may be a family dependent on the daily toil of the unfortunate and made destitute by his removal.  One must be blind indeed not to see that all these losses are laid at the door of the criminal, a direct result of his crime, foreseen, too, at least confusedly, since there is a moral fault; and these must be made good, as far as the thing is possible, otherwise the sin will not be forgiven.