When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.
Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of good… In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.
- Flannery O’Connor
A Memoir of Mary Ann