"Doctor, I set my foot upon the very threshold of paradise!" cried the canon. "Ah, Providence is merciful, it loads a poor sinner like myself with blessings!"
"Heresy! blasphemy! impiety!" cried Abbé Ledoux. "You will be damned, thrice damned, as will be your tempter!"
"Come now, dear abbé," replied the doctor, "none of your tricks. Confess at once that I have convinced you by my reasoning."
"Certainly, because I defy you--you and all like you, past, present, or future--to get out of this dilemma."
"If gluttony is a monstrosity, then frugality pushed to the extreme ought to be a virtue."
"Then, my dear abbé, the more frugal a man is, according to your theory, the more deserving is he."
"So the man who lives on uncooked roots, and drinks water only for the purpose of self-mortification, would be the type and model of a virtuous man."
"And who doubts it? You can find that celestial type among the anchorites."
"Admirable types, indeed, abbé! Now, according to your ideas of making proselytes, you ought to desire most earnestly that all mankind should approach this type of ideal perfection as nearly as possible,--a man inhabiting a cave and living on roots. The beautiful ideal of your religious society would then be a society of cave-dwellers and root-eaters, administering rough discipline by way of pastime."
"Would to God it might be so!" sternly answered the abbé; "there would be then as many righteous on the earth as there are men."
"In the first place that would deplete the census considerably, my dear abbé, and afterward there would be the little inconvenience of destroying with one blow all the various industries, the specimens of which we have just been admiring. Without taking into account the industry of weavers who make our cloth, silversmiths who emboss silver plate, fabricators of porcelain and glass, painters, gilders, who embellish our houses, upholsterers, etc., that is to say, society, in approaching your ideal, would annihilate three-fourths of the most flourishing industries, and, in other words, would return to a savage state."
"Better work out your salvation in a savage state," persisted the opinionated Abbé Ledoux, "than deserve eternal agony by abandoning yourself to the pleasures of a corrupt civilisation."