Stendahl on "selling the faithful a place in heaven"

"There is a way of eating a soft-boiled egg, in the seminary, that testifies to progress toward a life of devotion."

Stendahl, The red and the black: a chronicle of 1830, pt. 1, chap. 26 (trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 172). Julien was not making "much progress in his attempts at an externalized hypocrisy" (chap. 27 (p. 176)).