divided
Europe among themselves could do without it, and had ceased to tremble at
the harmless thunderbolts of excommunication or to look on the pope as
aught but a master of ceremonies, controlling certain rites. The
possession of the people was no longer subject to the same rules.
Allowing that the kings still held the people from God, it was the pope's
duty to register the donation once for all, without ever intervening,
whatever the circumstances, in the government of states. Never was Rome
farther away from the realisation of its ancient dream of universal
dominion. And when the French Revolution burst forth, it may well have
been imagined that the proclamation of the rights of man would kill that
papacy to which the exercise of divine right over the nations had been
committed. And so how great at first was the anxiety, the anger, the
desperate resistance with which the Vatican opposed the idea of freedom,
the new _credo_ of liberated reason, of humanity regaining
self-possession and control. It was the apparent _denouement_ of the long
struggle between the pope and the emperor for possession of the people:
the emperor vanished, and the people, henceforward free to dispose of
itself, claimed to escape from the pope--an unforeseen solution, in which
it seemed as though all the ancient scaffolding of the Catholic world
must fall to the very ground.

At this point Pierre concluded the first part of his book by contrasting
primitive Christianity with present-day Catholicism, which is the triumph
of the rich and the powerful. That Roman society which Jesus had come to
destroy in the name of the poor and humble, had not Catholic Rome
steadily continued rebuilding it through all the centuries, by its policy
of cupidity and pride? And what bitter irony it was to find, after
eighteen hundred years of the Gospel, that the world was again collapsing
through frantic speculation, rotten banks, financial disasters, and the
frightful injustice of a few men gorged with wealth whilst thousands of
their brothers were dying of hunger! The whole redemption of the wretched
had to be worked afresh. However, Pierre gave expression to all these
terrible things in words so softened by charity, so steeped in hope, that
they lost their revolutionary danger. Moreover, he nowhere attacked the
dogmas. His book, in its sentimental, somewhat poetic form, was but the
cry of an apostle glowing with love for his fellow-men.

Then came the second pa