For was not this very vision an embodiment of the force that he hated?  It was this very thing that oppressed and confined his spirit—­this inexorable application of eternal principles to temporal affairs.  Here was a city of living men, each an individual personality, of individual tastes, thoughts, and passions, each a world to himself and monarch of that world.  Yet by some abominable trick, it seemed, these individuals were not merely in external matters forced to conform to the Society which they helped to compose, but interiorly too; they actually had been tyrannized over in their consciences and judgments, and loved their chains.  If he had known that the fires of revolt lay there sleeping beneath this smooth exterior he would have hated it far less; but he had seen with his own eyes that it was not so.  The crowds that had swarmed a while ago round the Cathedral, pouring in and filling it for the Te Deum of thanksgiving that one more country had been brought under the yoke; the sea of faces that had softly applauded and bowed beneath the blessing of those two Cardinals in scarlet; the enthusiasm, the more amazing in its silent orderliness, which had greeted the restoration of the old national Abbey to its Benedictine founders—­even the very interviews he had had with quiet, deferential men, who, he understood, stood at the very head of the secular powers; the memory of the young King kissing the ring of the abbot at the steps into the choir—­all these things proved plainly enough that by some supernatural alchemy the very minds of men had been transformed, that they were no longer free to rebel and resent and assert inalienable rights—­in short, that a revolution had passed over the world such as history had never before known, that men no longer lived free and independent lives of their own, but had been persuaded to contribute all that made them men to the Society which they composed.

He perceived now clearly that it was this forced contribution that he hated—–­this merging of the individual in the body, and the body one of principles that were at once precise and immutable.  It was the extinction of Self.

Then, almost without perceiving the connection, he turned in his mind to Christianity as he conceived it to be—­to his ideal figure of Christ; and in an instant he saw the contrast, and why it was that the moral instinct within him loathed and resented this modern Christian State.

For it was a gentle Figure that stood to him for Christ—­God? yes, in some profound and mysterious way, but, for all earthly purposes of love and imitation, a meek and persuasive Man whose kingdom was not of this world, who repudiated violence and inculcated love; One who went through the world with simple tasks and soft words, who suffered without striking, who obeyed with no desire to rule.

And what had this tranquil, tolerant Figure in common with the strong discipline of this Church that bore His name—­a Church that had waited so long, preaching His precepts, until she grew mighty and could afford to let them drop:  this Church which, after centuries of blood and tears, at last had laid her hands upon the sceptre, and ruled the world with whom she had pleaded in vain so long; this Church who, after two thousand years of pain, had at last put her enemies under her feet—­“repressed” the infidel and killed the heretic?