ecessary for a man to ride
from Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkran
to the Pope, and to return with correspondence. It was a dangerous task,
and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertook
it by turns. In this manner all matters for which the Pope's personal
attention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent,
could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within the
twenty-four hours.

It was a brilliant moonlit night. The great golden shield was riding
high above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the long
slopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before the
house-door--casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far more
concrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs or
even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and
there sparkled up the stony pathway. Compared with this clear splendour,
the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing;
and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in
his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to
bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out to
it.

This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life. For him there
were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master. It was an
immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God's
Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar. As regarded the movements
of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of
the waves far beneath. Of course the world was restless, he half
perceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restless
until they found their rest in God. _Quare fremuerunt gentes?...
Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus!_ As to the end--he was not
greatly concerned. It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed,
but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all things
earthly. The gates of hell shall not prevail: when Rome falls, the world
falls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power. For
himself, he imagined that the end was not far away. When he had named
Megiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural
that at the consummation of all things Christ's Vicar should dwell at
Nazareth where His King had come on earth--and that the Armageddon of
the Divine John should