Luke Mohan’s Reviews > A Watch in the Night > Status Update

“One thinks to do so much and he does so little, and that little so strangely compounded of blindness and good intent and much effort and much thwarting, and the end is a watch in the night,“ said Jacomo, suddenly feeling that all the world had melted away…

“But that’s a fool’s way to die, and not a gentleman’s…

So says a young man who would gladly go to war against an enemy but would not go with Jacomo to help the plague victims in Montefalco.

These things that have been are passed, and we are men who need not mind them.

He found himself giving thanks for all these things, not as something remembered wistfully in privation, but as something which he held forever in the keeping of God.

…desiring nothing but the good, one might yet through blindness do much evil, great evil. And for the consequences of that evil, blindness might be just as potent as ill-will..

…he thought on the long patience of God whom all men, Christian as well as heathen outraged time after time, and how seldom He struck the offender.

Suddenly, it came to Jacomo that here was the central action of all time, and that as the macrocosm is forever reflected in the microcosm, so the history of the race was re-enacted in each human history.

There is no wherewithal so potent as need.

…the destruction of the castle had drawn all those rowdies whom the wall of civilization even when strongest hold in check only with difficulty…

“…It was in substance what we have all said, that if the Church is to bring men to Christ, she must show them Christ in every moment of her daily life…He made you feel that it could be done, that he was going to do it.”