The mind of man is glutted with passion: he has, if I may use another
familiar phrase, passion to burn. But this unhappy soul, whose natural
depravity is equal to its sudden aptitude, paradoxical enough, for charity
and the most arduous virtues, is full of paradoxes which allow him to turn
to other purposes the overflow of this overmastering passion. He never
imagines that he is selling himself wholesale: he forgets, in his
infatuation, that he is matched against a player more cunning and more
strong than he; and that the Spirit of Evil, though one give him but a hair,
will not delay to carry off the whole head.
