Engaged in conversation with the great man, she innocently asked, “Is not man naturally good?” The great man replied gruffly, “No, madam, no more than a wolf”.

That story came to mind as the recent news about Josef Fritzl and his ‘house of horrors’ filtered out from Amstetten in Austria. In the cellar of his apartment building the domestic tyrant held his own daughter Elisabeth captive for 24 years.

During those years he repeatedly beat and raped her, fathering seven children in the process. One had died in infancy, three were ‘adopted’ by Fritzl and his wife, while the other three were confined, with their mother, in their cramped, underground complex.

When the eldest took seriously ill, and needed hospital treatment, an investigation was triggered which uncovered the sordid truth of Fritzl’s domestic life.

A host of questions invade the mind.

Why did Fritzl’s wife accept so readily the story that Elisabeth had run away to join a cult? And why, when three children appeared on her doorstep, with information that Elisabeth could not provide for them, was the development accepted with such equanimity

Could his wife really have had no suspicions? And how could no one have noticed, or suspected anything over such a long period of years?

The tragic incident underlines two truths of Scripture. First, the Bible alone gives an analysis of human nature that rings true with human experience. Humans, in certain circumstances, are capable of doing terrible things to one another, witness the atrocities that mark all human warfare.

Do not heed the woolly thinker who boasts of the goodness of human nature. It is a mixture of good and evil. In Manchester a month ago, a cyclist knocked down on a busy road was left to die by other drivers, who simply swerved around his body.

As the great historian Herbert Butterfield remarked, civilisation is only a veneer, and each generation is equidistant from barbarism

And Fritzl’s exposure underlines another Bible truth, the one day our sins will find us out. (Numbers 32;23). In a classic book of Irish legal stories, ‘The Old Munster Curcuit’ by Maurice Healy (I’d pay good money for copy!), a story is told of an Irish couple, celebrating their marriage before emigrating to Australia.

The morning after, the brides’ parents were missing, and the explanation was given that on the spur of the moment they had set off with the happy couple, making their way to Cork, and a boat to a new life in Australia.

Forty years elapse, and during a long drought, old wells were opened on the farm, and the skeletons of a man and a woman were discovered. Irish police made the long trip to Australia to arrest the couple who, for forty years, had felt sure their crime was undetected.

It is a healthy reminder that in a world which produces the likes of Josef Fritzl, God’s rule still runs!