His spiritual tyranny, that arrogated Jus, by right of which he claimed the hemisphere revealed by Christopher Columbus, and imposed upon the press of Europe the censure of the Church of Rome, was rendered ten times monstrous by the glare reflected on it from the unquenched furnace of a godless life.  The universal conscience of Christianity is revolted by those unnamable delights, orgies of blood and festivals of lust, which were enjoyed in the plenitude of his green and vigorous old age by this versatile diplomatist and subtle priest, who controlled the councils of kings, and who chanted the sacramental service for a listening world on Easter Day in Rome.  Rome has never been small or weak or mediocre.  And now in the Pontificate of Alexander ’that memorable scene’ presented to the nations of the modern world a pageant of Antichrist and Antiphysis—­the negation of the Gospel and of nature; a glaring spectacle of discord between humanity as it aspires to be at its best, and humanity as it is at its worst; a tragi-comedy composed by some infernal Aristophanes, in which the servant of servants, the anointed of the Lord, the lieutenant upon earth of Christ, played the chief part.  It may be objected that this is the language not of history but of the legend.  I reply that there are occasions when the legend has caught the spirit of the truth.

Alexander was a stronger and a firmer man than his immediate predecessors.  ‘He combined,’ says Guicciardini, ’craft with singular sagacity, a sound judgment with extraordinary powers of persuasion; and to all the grave affairs of life he applied ability and pains beyond belief.’[1] His first care was to reduce Rome to order.  The old factions of Colonna and Orsini, which Sixtus had scotched, but which had raised their heads again during the dotage of Innocent, were destroyed in his Pontificate.  In this way, as Machiavelli observed,[2] he laid the real basis for the temporal power of the Papacy.  Alexander, indeed, as a sovereign, achieved for the Papal See what Louis XI. had done for the throne of France, and made Rome on its small scale follow the type of the large European monarchies.  The faithlessness and perjuries of the Pope, ’who never did aught else but deceive, nor ever thought of anything but this, and always found occasion for his frauds,’[3] when combined with his logical intellect and persuasive eloquence, made him a redoubtable antagonist.  All considerations of religion and morality were subordinated by him with strict impartiality to policy:  and his policy he restrained to two objects—­the advancement of his family, and the consolidation of the temporal power.  These were narrow aims for the ambition of a potentate who with one stroke of his pen pretended to confer the new-found world on Spain.  Yet they taxed his whole strength, and drove him to the perpetration of enormous crimes.