error is this: that those who have found the pearl of price--who
have named and known it--will still grovel after the lower gain. Such
the Aretine bishop who sent Pompilia back to her tormentor; the friar
who refused to save her because he feared the world; the nuns who at
first testified to her purity, and were ready to prove her one of
dishonest life, when they learned that she possessed riches which by so
doing they might confiscate to themselves.

Nor is the fault in humanity at large: for love and faith have leapt
forth profusely in the olden time, at the summons of "unacknowledged,"
"uncommissioned" powers of good. Caponsacchi has shown that they do so
still. Before Paul had spoken and Felix heard, Euripides had pronounced
virtue the law of life, and, in his doctrine of hidden forces,
foreshadowed the one God. Euripides felt his way in the darkness. He,
the Pope, walking in the glare of noon, might ask support of him. Where
does the fault lie? It lies in the excess of certainty--in the too great
familiarity with the truth--in that encroachment of earthly natives on
the heavenly, which is begotten by the security of belief. Between night
and noonday there has been the dawn, with its searching illumination,
its thrill of faith, the rapture of self-sacrifice in which anchorite
and martyr foretasted the joys of heaven. Now Christianity is hard
because it has become too easy; because of the "ignoble confidence,"
which will enjoy this world and yet count upon the next: the "shallow
cowardice," which renders the old heroism impossible.

The Pope is discursive, as is the manner of his age; and his reflections
have been, hitherto, rather suggested by the case before him than
directly related to it. But he grasps it again in a burst of prophetic
insight which these very reflections have produced. Heroism has become
impossible,

"Unless ... what whispers me of times to come?
What if it be the mission of that age
My death will usher into life, to shake
This torpor of assurance from our creed?" (vol. x. p. 137.)

What if earthquake be about to try the towers which lions dare no longer
attack: if man be destined to live once more, in the new-born readiness
for death? Is the time at hand, when the new faith shall be broken up as
the old has been; when reported truth shall once more be compared with
the actual truth--the portrait of the Divine with its reality? Is not
perhaps the Molinist[28] himse