o hid Himself, a Divine Saviour Who delayed to come, a Comforter heard
no longer in wind nor seen in fire!

There, in the next room, was a little wooden altar, and above it an iron
box, and within that box a silver cup, and within that cup--Something.
Outside the house, a hundred yards away, lay the domes and plaster roofs
of a little village called Nazareth; Carmel was on the right, a mile or
two away, Thabor on the left, the plain of Esdraelon in front; and
behind, Cana and Galilee, and the quiet lake, and Hermon. And far away
to the south lay Jerusalem....

It was to this tiny strip of holy land that the Pope had come--the land
where a Faith had sprouted two thousand years ago, and where, unless God
spoke in fire from heaven, it would presently be cut down as a cumberer
of the ground. It was here on this material earth that One had walked
Whom all men had thought to have been He Who would redeem Israel--in
this village that He had fetched water and made boxes and chairs, on
that long lake that His Feet had walked, on that high hill that He had
flamed in glory, on that smooth, low mountain to the north that He had
declared that the meek were blessed and should inherit the earth, that
peacemakers were the children of God, that they who hungered and
thirsted should be satisfied.

And now it was come to this. Christianity had smouldered away from
Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of
ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God,
had been acclaimed as divine. The world had leaped forward; social
science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too,
the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or,
rather, they said, in spite of Him. There were left, perhaps, three
millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions--it was impossible to
know--throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus
Christ as God. And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room in
Nazareth, dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.

* * * * *

He had done what He could. There had been a week five months ago when
it had been doubtful whether anything at all could be done. There were
left three Cardinals alive, Himself, Steinmann, and the Patriarch of
Jerusalem; the rest lay mangled somewhere in the ruins of Rome. There
was no precedent to follow; so the two Europeans had made their way out
to the East, and to the one town