rated by two
hundred and fifty millions of Christians. Against the purple background
of the hangings of the _baldacchino_, between the wing-like drapery on
either side, enclosing, as it were, a brasier of glory, he assumed real
majesty of aspect. He was no longer the feeble old man with the slow,
jerky walk and the slender, scraggy neck of a poor ailing bird. The
simious ugliness of his face, the largeness of his nose, the long slit of
his mouth, the hugeness of his ears, the conflicting jumble of his
withered features disappeared. In that waxen countenance you only
distinguished the admirable, dark, deep eyes, beaming with eternal youth,
with extraordinary intelligence and penetration. And then there was a
resolute bracing of his entire person, a consciousness of the eternity
which he represented, a regal nobility, born of the very circumstance
that he was now but a mere breath, a soul set in so pellucid a body of
ivory that it became visible as though it were already freed from the
bonds of earth. And Pierre realised what such a man--the Sovereign
Pontiff, the king obeyed by two hundred and fifty millions of
subjects--must be for the devout and dolent creatures who came to adore
him from so far, and who fell at his feet awestruck by the splendour of
the powers incarnate in him. Behind him, amidst the purple of the
hangings, what a gleam was suddenly afforded of the spheres beyond, what
an Infinite of ideality and blinding glory! So many centuries of history
from the Apostle Peter downward, so much strength and genius, so many
struggles and triumphs to be summed up in one being, the Elect, the
Unique, the Superhuman! And what a miracle, incessantly renewed, was that
of Heaven deigning to descend into human flesh, of the Deity fixing His
abode in His chosen servant, whom He consecrated above and beyond all
others, endowing him with all power and all science! What sacred
perturbation, what emotion fraught with distracted love might one not
feel at the thought of the Deity being ever there in the depths of that
man's eyes, speaking with his voice and emanating from his hand each time
that he raised it to bless! Could one imagine the exorbitant absoluteness
of that sovereign who was infallible, who disposed of the totality of
authority in this world and of salvation in the next! At all events, how
well one understood that souls consumed by a craving for faith should fly
towards him, that those who at last found the certainty