“Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee....  For behold I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered nor come into mind....  Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders.  O thou so long afflicted, tossed with tempest and not comforted; behold I will lay thy stones with fair colours, and thy foundations with sapphires....  I will make thy windows of agates and thy gates of carbuncles, and all thy borders of pleasant stones.  Arise, shine, for thy light is come.”

As the chink of the censer-chains had sounded in the stillness, with one consent the enormous crowd had fallen on its knees, and so remained, as the smoke curled up from the hands of the rebel figure who held the thurible.  Then the organ had begun to blow, and from the huge massed chorus in the transepts had rolled out the anthem, broken by one passionate cry, from some mad Catholic.  But it had been silenced in an instant....

It was incredible—­utterly incredible, Percy had told himself.  Yet the incredible had happened; and England had found its worship once more—­the necessary culmination of unimpeded subjectivity.  From the provinces had come the like news.  In cathedral after cathedral had been the same scenes.  Markenheim’s masterpiece, executed in four days after the passing of the bill, had been reproduced by the ordinary machinery, and four thousand replicas had been despatched to every important centre.  Telegraphic reports had streamed into the London papers that everywhere the new movement had been received with acclamation, and that human instincts had found adequate expression at last.  If there had not been a God, mused Percy reminiscently, it would have been necessary to invent one.  He was astonished, too, at the skill with which the new cult had been framed.  It moved round no disputable points; there was no possibility of divergent political tendencies to mar its success, no over-insistence on citizenship, labour and the rest, for those who were secretly individualistic and idle.  Life was the one fount and centre of it all, clad in the gorgeous robes of ancient worship.  Of course the thought had been Felsenburgh’s, though a German name had been mentioned.  It was Positivism of a kind, Catholicism without Christianity, Humanity worship without its inadequacy.  It was not man that was worshipped but the Idea of man, deprived of his supernatural principle.  Sacrifice, too, was recognised—­the instinct of oblation without the demand made by transcendent Holiness upon the blood-guiltiness of man....  In fact,—­in fact, said Percy, it was exactly as clever as the devil, and as old as Cain.

The advice he had given to the Holy Father just now was a counsel of despair, or of hope; he really did not know which.  He had urged that a stringent decree should be issued, forbidding any acts of violence on the part of Catholics.  The faithful were to be encouraged to be patient, to hold utterly aloof from the worship, to say nothing unless they were questioned, to suffer bonds gladly.  He had suggested, in company with the German Cardinal, that they two should return to their respective countries at the close of the year, to encourage the waverers; but the answer had been that their vocation was to remain in Rome, unless something unforeseen happened.