“If the world were not full of sorrow and sin; if it were a terrestrial paradise… how could people’s hearts and minds have ever been knit together into one? Compassion, the divine thing about us, would have lain dormant in the depths of our heart like a pearl buried in the ocean; whereas now it shines even in the darkest and most seemingly God-forsaken souls”

(George Tyrrell, Nova et Vetera [The New and the Old]: Informal Meditations for Times of Spiritual Dryness, 1897).