Pietas
‘For if the dark places of the earth have always been full of the habitations of cruelty, there has always been a spring of mercy in mankind. The Roman virtue of pietas is the strong root from which our pity, in every sense, derives. Religion has had its own savageries: yet even the arbitrary Godhead of the Book of Job was concerned for the young ravens wandering from the nest for lack of meat, and it was Christ’s claim that a huddle of feathers on the ground was not unregarded by the Father of mankind. “With Christ”, said Sulpicius Severus, “every brute beast is wise, and every savage creature gentle”: and St Kevin refused the levelling of the mountain about Glendalough to make his monks rich pasture, because he would not have God’s creatures disturbed for him. In the first paradise that lies behind the memory of the world, there was no cruelty: and when Isaiah, sick of war, made his poem of the golden world, the climax-vision was a holy mountain where “they shall not hurt or destroy”.’ It is good to be reminded.
