He had ended by a great silent Benediction of the City and the World:  and there were not wanting a half-dozen of the faithful who had seen, they thought, a white shape in the form of a bird that hung in the air while he spoke white as a mist, translucent as water....

The consequent scenes in the city and suburbs had been unparalleled, for thousands of families had with one consent dissolved human ties.  Husbands had found their way to the huge houses on the Quirinal set apart for them; wives to the Aventine; while the children, as confident as their parents, had swarmed over to the Sisters of St. Vincent who had received at the Pope’s orders the gift of three streets to shelter them in.  Everywhere the smoke of burning went up in the squares where household property, rendered useless by the vows of poverty, were consumed by their late owners; and daily long trains moved out from the station outside the walls carrying jubilant loads of those who were despatched by the Pope’s delegates to be the salt of men, consumed in their function, and leaven plunged in the vast measures of the infidel world.  And that infidel world welcomed their coming with bitter laughter.

From the rest of Christendom had poured in news of success.  The same precautions had been observed as in Rome, for the directions issued were precise and searching; and day after day came in the long rolls of the new Religious drawn up by the diocesan superiors.

Within the last few days, too, other lists had arrived, more glorious than all.  Not only did reports stream in that already the Order was beginning its work and that already broken communications were being re-established, that devoted missioners were in process of organising themselves, and that hope was once more rising in the most desperate hearts; but better than all this was the tidings of victory in another sphere.  In Paris forty of the new-born Order had been burned alive in one day in the Latin quarter, before the Government intervened.  From Spain, Holland, Russia had come in other names.  In Dusseldorf eighteen men and boys, surprised at their singing of Prime in the church of Saint Laurence, had been cast down one by one into the city-sewer, each chanting as he vanished: 

“Christi Fili Dei vivi miserere nobis,”

and from the darkness had come up the same broken song till it was silenced with stones.  Meanwhile, the German prisons were thronged with the first batches of recusants.  The world shrugged its shoulders, and declared that they had brought it on themselves, while yet it deprecated mob-violence, and requested the attention of the authorities and the decisive repression of this new conspiracy of superstition.  And within St. Peter’s Church the workmen were busy at the long rows of new altars, affixing to the stone diptychs the brass-forged names of those who had already fulfilled their vows and gained their crowns.

It was the first word of God’s reply to the world’s challenge.