dare to answer the
question, and decide if the new nations thirsting for fraternity and
justice would really find there the religion necessary for the
democracies of to-morrow; for he had not been able to probe things, and
only carried a first impression away with him. But how keen it was, and
how ill it boded for his dreams! A gate of bronze! Yes, a hard,
impregnable gate, so completely shutting the Vatican off from the rest of
the world that nothing new had entered the palace for three hundred
years. Behind that portal the old centuries, as far as the sixteenth,
remained immutable. Time seemed to have stayed its course there for ever;
nothing more stirred; the very costumes of the Swiss Guards, the Noble
Guards, and the prelates themselves were unchanged; and you found
yourself in the world of three hundred years ago, with its etiquette, its
costumes, and its ideas. That the popes in a spirit of haughty protest
should for five and twenty years have voluntarily shut themselves up in
their palace was already regrettable; but this imprisonment of centuries
within the past, within the grooves of tradition, was far more serious
and dangerous. It was all Catholicism which was thus imprisoned, whose
dogmas and sacerdotal organisation were obstinately immobilised. Perhaps,
in spite of its apparent flexibility, Catholicism was really unable to
yield in anything, under peril of being swept away, and therein lay both
its weakness and its strength. And then what a terrible world was there,
how great the pride and ambition, how numerous the hatreds and rivalries!
And how strange the prison, how singular the company assembled behind the
bars--the Crucified by the side of Jupiter Capitolinus, all pagan
antiquity fraternising with the Apostles, all the splendours of the
Renascence surrounding the pastor of the Gospel who reigns in the name of
the humble and the poor!

The sun was sinking, the gentle, luscious sweetness of the Roman evenings
was falling from the limpid heavens, and after that splendid day spent
with Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, the ancients, and the Pope, in the finest
palace of the world, the young priest lingered, distracted, on the Piazza
of St. Peter's.

"Well, you must excuse me, my dear Abbe," concluded Narcisse. "But I will
now confess to you that I suspect my worthy cousin of a fear that he
might compromise himself by meddling in your affair. I shall certainly
see him again, but you will do well not to put too