All this,' say
they, 'is allowable and indifferent; it is true that, as to holding
the ladder, they must be threatened, more than usually, with being
punished for refusing; for it is doing an injury to the master of a
house to enter it by the window.' You perceive the judiciousness of
that observation, of course?"
"I expected nothing less," said I, "from a book edited by
four-and-twenty Jesuits."
"But," added the monk, "Father Bauny has gone beyond this; he
has taught valets how to perform these sorts of offices for their
masters quite innocently, by making them direct their intention, not
to the sins to which they are accessary, but to the gain which is to
accrue from them. In his Summary of Sins, p.710, first edition, he
thus states the matter: 'Let confessors observe,' says he, 'that
they cannot absolve valets who perform base errands, if they consent
to the sins of their masters; but the reverse holds true, if they have
done the thing merely from a regard to their temporal emolument.'
And that, I should conceive, is no difficult matter to do; for why
should they insist on consenting to sins of which they taste nothing
but the trouble? The same Father Bauny has established a prime maxim
in favour of those who are not content with their wages: 'May servants
who are dissatisfied with their wages use means to raise them by
laying their hands on as much of the property of their masters as they
may consider necessary to make the said wages equivalent to their
trouble? They may, in certain circumstances; as when they are so
poor that, in looking for a situation, they have been obliged to
accept the offer made to them, and when other servants of the same
class are gaining more than they, elsewhere.
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