e was, on to his bed, and lay there with
drumming pulses, closed eyes and a huge despair at his heart. The world
indeed had risen like a giant over the horizons of Rome, and the holy
city was no better now than a sand castle before a tide. So much he
grasped. As to how ruin would come, in what form and from what
direction, he neither knew nor cared. Only he knew now that it would
come.

He had learned by now something of his own temperament; and he turned
his eyes inwards to observe himself bitterly, as a doctor in mortal
disease might with a dreadful complacency diagnose his own symptoms. It
was even a relief to turn from the monstrous mechanism of the world to
see in miniature one hopeless human heart. For his own religion he no
longer feared; he knew, as absolutely as a man may know the colour of
his eyes, that it was secure again and beyond shaking. During those
weeks in Rome the cloudy deposit had run clear and the channel was once
more visible. Or, better still, that vast erection of dogma, ceremony,
custom and morals in which he had been educated, and on which he had
looked all his life (as a man may stare upon some great set-piece that
bewilders him), seeing now one spark of light, now another, flare and
wane in the darkness, had little by little kindled and revealed itself
in one stupendous blaze of divine fire that explains itself. Huge
principles, once bewildering and even repellent, were again luminously
self-evident; he saw, for example, that while Humanity-Religion
endeavoured to abolish suffering the Divine Religion embraced it, so
that the blind pangs even of beasts were within the Father's Will and
Scheme; or that while from one angle one colour only of the web of life
was visible--material, or intellectual, or artistic--from another the
Supernatural was as eminently obvious. Humanity-Religion could only be
true if at least half of man's nature, aspirations and sorrows were
ignored. Christianity, on the other hand, at least included and
accounted for these, even if it did not explain them. This ... and this
... and this ... all made the one and perfect whole. There was the
Catholic Faith, more certain to him than the existence of himself: it
was true and alive. He might be damned, but God reigned. He might go
mad, but Jesus Christ was Incarnate Deity, proving Himself so by death
and Resurrection, and John his Vicar. These things were as the bones of
the Universe--facts beyond doubting--if they were not