“If your hand offends you, cut it off”

The injunction to cut off a sinful hand becomes a weapon of public judgment when the organist invokes it against Jagusia. In his sermon at the inn, a scriptural warning about removing what causes sin is turned into a demand that the village expel a woman he presents as the source of its moral danger.

The Saying in the Organist’s Sermon

The organist speaks from a bench in a crowded inn, where a hum of voices gives way to something like a sermon. He first casts the village as a house whose supports are being dismantled: one person takes a sill-beam, another the joists, another a piece of wall, until the structure collapses and crushes everyone inside. The image makes individual wrongdoing appear to threaten the survival of the whole community.

He then cites Scripture: "if your hand offend you cut it off," extending the image to the eye and its sin. The wording presents removal as a severe but necessary response to corruption. The organist immediately applies that logic to Jagusia, calling her worse than plague and pestilence and insisting that she be cast out before punishment falls on the village.

From Scriptural Warning to Collective Sentence

The saying’s force in this scene lies in its change of scale. The cited injunction concerns the removal of an offending part; the organist makes Jagusia that part, and the village the body that must be saved. His appeal therefore does more than condemn her conduct: it frames expulsion as an act of communal self-preservation, backed by the threat of divine retribution.

The crowd takes up the demand. Voices cry that the time has come and that the people are entitled to punish and reward; calls to drive Jagusia out grow louder. The sermon thus becomes a public call to action. Its scriptural authority helps make a proposed act of exclusion sound like a necessary moral duty rather than a decision for which the crowd remains responsible.

The Village’s Contradictions

The organist’s house-and-body imagery is sharpened by the disorder around the speech. The inn is full, several people are speaking at once, and the organist’s wife repeatedly tells the story about Jasio while the Voyt’s wife recounts her own grievances. The accusation against Jagusia gathers force amid competing complaints and gossip, not in a calm inquiry that distinguishes individual responsibility from the village’s wider troubles.

Elsewhere, the evidence presents hardship that cannot be reduced to one supposed offender. Before spring, hired hands face hunger and lack of work; villagers had expected employment when the Squire began felling the Wolf’s Hollow woodland, but he has refused to hire men from Lipce. A complaint has also been lodged against him, and resistance to the felling is bound up with the villagers’ claims of injustice. These conflicts show a community confronting material and political injuries as well as moral disputes.

A separate account of poverty makes the contrast still sharper. Filipka’s family has no potatoes, has sold its quilt, and must beg for groats; Florka gives birth while sick and without milk, as the fields stand fallow because the men are imprisoned. The speaker also condemns farmers who concern themselves with their own meals and lending returns while leaving the poor to divine care. Against this background, the organist’s call to excise Jagusia concentrates collective blame on a single woman even as suffering and responsibility extend throughout the village.

Significance

The saying operates both as a biblical image and as a mechanism of social exclusion. Its stark logic—remove what offends before it brings ruin—allows the organist to connect private sin, communal danger, and divine punishment in a single appeal. Yet the surrounding evidence complicates that appeal: the village’s crises include poverty, the denial of work, forest conflict, and the consequences of imprisonment, none of which can be removed by casting out Jagusia. The expression’s significance lies in that tension between a language of moral purification and the broader, shared conditions the village leaves unresolved.