It was remarkable, too, to observe how the news had been accepted by the two other divisions of the world.  The East was enthusiastic; America was divided.  But in any case America was powerless:  the balance of the world was overwhelmingly against her.

Percy threw himself, as he was, on to his bed, and lay there with drumming pulses, closed eyes and a huge despair at his heart.  The world indeed had risen like a giant over the horizons of Rome, and the holy city was no better now than a sand castle before a tide.  So much he grasped.  As to how ruin would come, in what form and from what direction, he neither knew nor cared.  Only he knew now that it would come.

He had learned by now something of his own temperament; and he turned his eyes inwards to observe himself bitterly, as a doctor in mortal disease might with a dreadful complacency diagnose his own symptoms.  It was even a relief to turn from the monstrous mechanism of the world to see in miniature one hopeless human heart.  For his own religion he no longer feared; he knew, as absolutely as a man may know the colour of his eyes, that it was secure again and beyond shaking.  During those weeks in Rome the cloudy deposit had run clear and the channel was once more visible.  Or, better still, that vast erection of dogma, ceremony, custom and morals in which he had been educated, and on which he had looked all his life (as a man may stare upon some great set-piece that bewilders him), seeing now one spark of light, now another, flare and wane in the darkness, had little by little kindled and revealed itself in one stupendous blaze of divine fire that explains itself.  Huge principles, once bewildering and even repellent, were again luminously self-evident; he saw, for example, that while Humanity-Religion endeavoured to abolish suffering the Divine Religion embraced it, so that the blind pangs even of beasts were within the Father’s Will and Scheme; or that while from one angle one colour only of the web of life was visible—­material, or intellectual, or artistic—­from another the Supernatural was as eminently obvious.  Humanity-Religion could only be true if at least half of man’s nature, aspirations and sorrows were ignored.  Christianity, on the other hand, at least included and accounted for these, even if it did not explain them.  This ... and this ... and this ... all made the one and perfect whole.  There was the Catholic Faith, more certain to him than the existence of himself:  it was true and alive.  He might be damned, but God reigned.  He might go mad, but Jesus Christ was Incarnate Deity, proving Himself so by death and Resurrection, and John his Vicar.  These things were as the bones of the Universe—­facts beyond doubting—­if they were not true, nothing anywhere was anything but a dream.