began to
stroke it, first with one hand, then with the other, and, puckering his
eyes, which sparkled with a shrewd smile, for he was pleased with his
own words, watched for surprise on Benedetto's face.

"We are, moreover, believers also," he continued.

The other personage, without raising his head from the back of the
couch, lifted his open hands, and said, almost solemnly:

"Steady!" "Let the word pass, my dear friend," the first speaker said,
without looking towards him. "We are both believers, but in different
ways. I believe in God with all my might, and my might is great, and
I shall have Him with me always, You believe in God, with all your
weaknesses, and they are few, and you will not have Him with you until
you are upon your death-bed."

Another shrewd and self-complacent smile, another pause. The friend
shook his head, raising his eyebrows as if he had heard a jest deserving
only of commiseration, but not of an answer.

"I, for my part," the deep and harmonious voice went on, "am also a
Christian. Not a Catholic, but a Christian. Indeed, because I am a
Christian am an anti-Catholic. My heart is Christian, and my brain
is Protestant. It is with joy that I see in Catholicism signs, not of
decrepitude, but of putrefaction. Charity is being dissolved in the most
sincerely Catholic hearts into a dark mud, full of the worms of hatred.
I see Catholicism cracking in many places, and I see the ancient
idolatry upon which it has raised itself bursting forth through the
cracks. What few youthful, healthy, and vital energies appear within it,
all tend to separate from it. I know that you are a radical Catholic,
that you are the friend of a man who is really sound and strong, and
who calls himself a Catholic, but who is pronounced a heretic by true
Catholics; and a heretic he certainly is. I have been told you are a
pupil of this noble heretic, who labours for reforms and who, at the
same time, tries to influence the Pontiff. Now, I myself am looking
for a great reformer, but he must be an antipope; not antipope in the
narrow, historical sense, but an antipope in the Lutheran sense of the
word. Curiosity pricks us to know in what way you believe it possible to
rejuvenate this poor old Papacy, of which we laymen are ahead not only
in the conquest of civilisation, but also in the science of God, even in
the science of Christ, this Papacy which follows us at a great distance,
panting and stopping by the way every now