. But on
either side of this, with spaces between, stood enormous groups
of men and horses, marshalled, no doubt, in order to take their
places at the proper moment in the procession.

At the right, immovable and tremendous, rose up the great palace
of the Vatican itself, unadorned except where a glint of some
colour showed itself at the Bronze Doors; and above all, like a
benediction in stone, against the vivid blue of the sky, hung the
dome of the basilica.

Monsignor Masterman made a long, keen survey of all this. Then he
leaned back and sighed.

"What was the first year that the Pope came out of the
Vatican like this?"

"The year after the conquest of United Italy. It was Austria that----"

"I know all that. And you mean he never came out so long as the
old state of affairs continued?"

"How could he? Don't you see that the one thing, humanly
speaking, absolutely necessary if the world was to have
confidence in the Church, was that the Pope should be really
supra-national? Of course, for many years he had to be an
Italian--that's obvious, since he was at the mercy of Italy, and
the Romans would never have stood a foreigner; and that made it
all the more essential that he should be cut clean off, in
everything else, from Italian sympathies. He had to be two
things simultaneously, so to speak--emphatically an Italian for
the sake of Italy and indeed his own existence in Rome; and
emphatically not an Italian for the sake of the rest of
Christendom. And can you suggest any other way of accomplishing
this paradox? I can't."

Monsignor sighed again and began to meditate.

For somewhere at the back of his mind there ran an undercurrent
of thought, or as of some one talking, to the effect that the
Pope's old method of remaining as a prisoner in the Vatican was a
foolish and unhumble pose. (He supposed he must have read it all
somewhere in history.) Surely even Catholics used to talk like
that! They used to say how much more spiritual and Christian it
would have been, had the Vicar of Christ acquiesced and been
content to live as a simple Italian subject, neither claiming nor
desiring a position such as Peter had never enjoyed. Why all this
fuss, it used to be asked, about a Temporal Power on behalf of a
"Kingdom that was not of this world"?

Yet, somehow, now as he looked back on it all, with his friend's
comment in his mind, he began to see, not how clever or
diplomatic had been the old attitude, but how abs