“We shouldn’t, but we do.”

An episode, from over half a century ago, of the radio series “Gunsmoke”, heard tonight on “The Big Broadcast.”

It was about a delinquent and abandoned boy, who is captured while stealing a horse.  Matt Dillon and his friend cut the lad some slack, and offer him a job as a stable-boy.  He enquires, What if I steal?

“We trust you,” they say.

The boy considers this, and, knowing what lurks in his own heart, says:

“You shouldn’t trust anyone.”

Now, this would be the time for a homily about the value of trust, or why we should all trust one another, or how mankind is just one big family etc etc;  but instead, Matt Dillon replies, without missing a beat:

“Maybe we shouldn’t, but we do.”

And that is the Christian answer -- the mystical and inexplicable answer of  the Bishop to Jean Valjean.

We shouldn’t, but we do.

That applies to so many things.