'Tis dangerous when the baser nature falls
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites:
They lie not near our conscience.
Ah! if they were all. But there is one misdeed, one which outweighs all others whatsoever—a crime which it is useless to palliate, let our other friend say what he pleased; and Reineke himself felt it so. It sate heavy, for him, on his soul, and alone of all the actions of his life we are certain that he wished it undone—the death and eating of that poor foolish Lampe, the hare. It was a paltry revenge in Reineke. Lampe had told tales of him; he had complained that Reineke, under pretence of teaching him his Catechism, had seized him and tried to murder him; and though he provoked his fate by thrusting himself, after such a warning, into the jaws of Malepartus, Reineke betrays an uneasiness about it in confession; and, unlike himself, feels it necessary to make some sort of an excuse.
Grimbart, the badger, Reineke's father confessor, had been obliged to speak severely of the seriousness of the offence. 'You see,' Reineke answers:—
To help oneself out through the world is a queer sort of business: one can not
Keep, you know, quite altogether as pure as one can in the cloister.
When we are handling honey we now and then lick at our fingers.
Lampe sorely provoked me; he frisked about this way and that way,