Lord of the World — 41 - Book 3 - The Victory: Chapter 1, Part 1

I

The little room where the new Pope sat reading was a model of simplicity.

Its walls were whitewashed, its roof unpolished rafters, and its floor beaten mud.

A square table stood in the centre, with a chair beside it; a cold brazier laid for lighting, stood in the wide hearth; a bookshelf against the wall held a dozen volumes.

There were three doors, one leading to the private oratory, one to the ante-room, and the third to the little paved court.

The south windows were shuttered, but through the ill-fitting hinges streamed knife-blades of fiery light from the hot Eastern day outside.

It was the time of the mid-day siesta, and except for the brisk scything of the _cicade_ from the hill-slope behind the house, all was in deep silence.

* * * * * The Pope, who had dined an hour before, had hardly shifted His attitude in all that time, so intent was He upon His reading.

For the while, all was put away, His own memory of those last three months, the bitter anxiety, the intolerable load of responsibility.

The book He held was a cheap reprint of the famous biography of Julian Felsenburgh, issued a month before, and He was now drawing to an end.

It was a terse, well-written book, composed by an unknown hand, and some even suspected it to be the disguised work of Felsenburgh himself.

More, however, considered that it was written at least with Felsenburgh’s consent by one of that small body of intimates whom he had admitted to his society--that body which under him now conducted the affairs of West and East.

From certain indications in the book it had been argued that its actual writer was a Westerner.

The main body of the work dealt with his life, or rather with those two or three years known to the world, from his rapid rise in American politics and his mediation in the East down to the event of five months ago, when in swift succession he had been hailed Messiah in Damascus, had been formally adored in London, and finally elected by an extraordinary majority to the Tribuniciate of the two Americas.

The Pope had read rapidly through these objective facts, for He knew them well enough already, and was now studying with close attention the summary of his character, or rather, as the author rather sententiously explained, the summary of his self-manifestation to the world.

He read the description of his two main characteristics, his grasp upon words and facts; “words, the daughters of earth, were wedded in this man to facts, the sons of heaven, and Superman was their offspring.

” His minor characteristics, too, were noticed, his appetite for literature, his astonishing memory, his linguistic powers.

He possessed, it appeared, both the telescopic and the microscopic eye--he discerned world-wide tendencies and movements on the one hand; he had a passionate capacity for detail on the other.

Various anecdotes illustrated these remarks, and a number of terse aphorisms of his were recorded.

“No man forgives,” he said; “he only understands.

” “It needs supreme faith to renounce a transcendent God.

” “A man who believes in himself is almost capable of believing in his neighbour.

” Here was a sentence that to the Pope’s mind was significant of that sublime egotism that is alone capable of confronting the Christian spirit: and again, “To forgive a wrong is to condone a crime,” and “The strong man is accessible to no one, but all are accessible to him.

” There was a certain pompousness in this array of remarks, but it lay, as the Pope saw very well, not in the speaker but in the scribe.

To him who had seen the speaker it was plain how they had been uttered--with no pontifical solemnity, but whirled out in a fiery stream of eloquence, or spoken with that strangely moving simplicity that had constituted his first assault on London.

It was possible to hate Felsenburgh, and to fear him; but never to be amused at him.

But plainly the supreme pleasure of the writer was to trace the analogy between his hero and nature.

In both there was the same apparent contradictoriness--the combination of utter tenderness and utter ruthlessness.

“The power that heals wounds also inflicts them: that clothes the dungheap with sweet growths and grasses, breaks, too, into fire and earthquake; that causes the partridge to die for her young, also makes the shrike with his living larder.

” So, too, with Felsenburgh; He who had wept over the Fall of Rome, a month later had spoken of extermination as an instrument that even now might be judicially used in the service of humanity.

Only it must be used with deliberation, not with passion.

The utterance had aroused extraordinary interest, since it seemed so paradoxical from one who preached peace and toleration; and argument had broken out all over the world.

But beyond enforcing the dispersal of the Irish Catholics, and the execution of a few individuals, so far that utterance had not been acted upon.

Yet the world seemed as a whole to have accepted it, and even now to be waiting for its fulfilment.

As the biographer pointed out, the world enclosed in physical nature should welcome one who followed its precepts, one who was indeed the first to introduce deliberately and confessedly into human affairs such laws as those of the Survival of the Fittest and the immorality of forgiveness.

If there was mystery in the one, there was mystery in the other, and both must be accepted if man was to develop.

And the secret of this, it seemed, lay in His personality.

To see Him was to believe in Him, or rather to accept Him as inevitably true.

“We do not explain nature or escape from it by sentimental regrets: the hare cries like a child, the wounded stag weeps great tears, the robin kills his parents; life exists only on condition of death; and these things happen however we may weave theories that explain nothing.

Life must be accepted on those terms; we cannot be wrong if we follow nature; rather to accept them is to find peace--our great mother only reveals her secrets to those who take her as she is.

” So, too, with Felsenburgh.

“It is not for us to discriminate: His personality is of a kind that does not admit it.

He is complete and sufficing for those who trust Him and are willing to suffer; an hostile and hateful enigma to those who are not.

We must prepare ourselves for the logical outcome of this doctrine.

Sentimentality must not be permitted to dominate reason.

” Finally, then, the writer showed how to this Man belonged properly all those titles hitherto lavished upon imagined Supreme Beings.

It was in preparation for Him that these types came into the realms of thought and influenced men’s lives.

He was the _Creator_, for it was reserved for Him to bring into being the perfect life of union to which all the world had hitherto groaned in vain; it was in His own image and likeness that He had made man.

Yet He was the _Redeemer_ too, for that likeness had in one sense always underlain the tumult of mistake and conflict.

He had brought man out of darkness and the shadow of death, guiding their feet into the way of peace.

He was the _Saviour_ for the same reason--the _Son of Man_, for He alone was perfectly human; He was the _Absolute_, for He was the content of Ideals; the _Eternal_, for He had lain always in nature’s potentiality and secured by His being the continuity of that order; the _Infinite_, for all finite things fell short of Him who was more than their sum.

He was _Alpha_, then, and _Omega_, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.

He was _Dominus et Deus noster_ (as Domitian had been, the Pope reflected).

He was as simple and as complex as life itself--simple in its essence, complex in its activities.

And last of all, the supreme proof of His mission lay in the immortal nature of His message.

There was no more to be added to what He had brought to light--for in Him all diverging lines at last found their origin and their end.

As to whether or no He would prove to be personally immortal was an wholly irrelevant thought; it would be indeed fitting if through His means the vital principle should disclose its last secret; but no more than fitting.

Already His spirit was in the world; the individual was no more separate from his fellows; death no more than a wrinkle that came and went across the inviolable sea.

For man had learned at last that the race was all and self was nothing; the cell had discovered the unity of the body; even, the greatest thinkers declared, the consciousness of the individual had yielded the title of Personality to the corporate mass of man--and the restlessness of the unit had sunk into the peace of a common Humanity, for nothing but this could explain the cessation of party strife and national competition--and this, above all, had been the work of Felsenburgh.

“_Behold I am with you always_,” quoted the writer in a passionate peroration, “_even now in the consummation of the world; and, the Comforter is come unto you.

I am the Door--the Way, the Truth and the Life--the Bread of Life and the Water of Life.

My name is Wonderful, the Prince of Peace, the Father Everlasting.

It is I who am the Desire of all nations, the fairest among the children of men--and of my Kingdom there shall be no end_.

” The Pope laid down the book, and leaned back, closing his eyes.

II

And as for Himself, what had He to say to all this?

A Transcendent God Who hid Himself, a Divine Saviour Who delayed to come, a Comforter heard no longer in wind nor seen in fire!

There, in the next room, was a little wooden altar, and above it an iron box, and within that box a silver cup, and within that cup--Something.

Outside the house, a hundred yards away, lay the domes and plaster roofs of a little village called Nazareth; Carmel was on the right, a mile or two away, Thabor on the left, the plain of Esdraelon in front; and behind, Cana and Galilee, and the quiet lake, and Hermon.

And far away to the south lay Jerusalem....

It was to this tiny strip of holy land that the Pope had come--the land where a Faith had sprouted two thousand years ago, and where, unless God spoke in fire from heaven, it would presently be cut down as a cumberer of the ground.

It was here on this material earth that One had walked Whom all men had thought to have been He Who would redeem Israel--in this village that He had fetched water and made boxes and chairs, on that long lake that His Feet had walked, on that high hill that He had flamed in glory, on that smooth, low mountain to the north that He had declared that the meek were blessed and should inherit the earth, that peacemakers were the children of God, that they who hungered and thirsted should be satisfied.

And now it was come to this.

Christianity had smouldered away from Europe like a sunset on darkening peaks; Eternal Rome was a heap of ruins; in East and West alike a man had been set upon the throne of God, had been acclaimed as divine.

The world had leaped forward; social science was supreme; men had learned consistency; they had learned, too, the social lessons of Christianity apart from a Divine Teacher, or, rather, they said, in spite of Him.

There were left, perhaps, three millions, perhaps five, at the utmost ten millions--it was impossible to know--throughout the entire inhabited globe who still worshipped Jesus Christ as God.

And the Vicar of Christ sat in a whitewashed room in Nazareth, dressed as simply as His master, waiting for the end.

* * * * * He had done what He could.

There had been a week five months ago when it had been doubtful whether anything at all could be done.

There were left three Cardinals alive, Himself, Steinmann, and the Patriarch of Jerusalem; the rest lay mangled somewhere in the ruins of Rome.

There was no precedent to follow; so the two Europeans had made their way out to the East, and to the one town in it where quiet still reigned.

With the disappearance of Greek Christianity there had also vanished the last remnants of internecine war in Christendom; and by a kind of tacit consent of the world, Christians were allowed a moderate liberty in Palestine.

Russia, which now held the country as a dependency, had sufficient sentiment left to leave it alone; it was true that the holy places had been desecrated, and remained now only as spots of antiquarian interest; the altars were gone but the sites were yet marked, and, although mass could no longer be said there, it was understood that private oratories were not forbidden.

It was in this state that the two European Cardinals had found the Holy City; it was not thought wise to wear insignia of any description in public; and it was practically certain even now that the civilised world was unaware of their existence; for within three days of their arrival the old Patriarch had died, yet not before Percy Franklin, surely under the strangest circumstances since those of the first century, had been elected to the Supreme Pontificate.

It had all been done in a few minutes by the dying man’s bedside.

The two old men had insisted.

The German had even recurred once more to the strange resemblance between Percy and Julian Felsenburgh, and had murmured his old half-heard remarks about the antithesis, and the Finger of God; and Percy, marvelling at his superstition, had accepted, and the election was recorded.

He had taken the name of Silvester, the last saint in the year, and was the third of that title.

He had then retired to Nazareth with his chaplain; Steinmann had gone back to Germany, and been hanged in a riot within a fortnight of his arrival.

The next matter was the creation of new cardinals, and to twenty persons, with infinite precautions, briefs had been conveyed.

Of these, nine had declined; three more had been approached, of whom only one had accepted.

There were therefore at this moment twelve persons in the world who constituted the Sacred College--two Englishmen, of whom Corkran was one; two Americans, a Frenchman, a German, an Italian, a Spaniard, a Pole, a Chinaman, a Greek, and a Russian.

To these were entrusted vast districts over which their control was supreme, subject only to the Holy Father Himself.

As regarded the Pope’s own life very little need be said.

It resembled, He thought, in its outward circumstances that of such a man as Leo the Great, without His worldly importance or pomp.

Theoretically, the Christian world was under His dominion; practically, Christian affairs were administered by local authorities.

It was impossible for a hundred reasons for Him to do what He wished with regard to the exchange of communications.

An elaborate cypher had been designed, and a private telegraphic station organised on His roof communicating with another in Damascus where Cardinal Corkran had fixed his residence; and from that centre messages occasionally were despatched to ecclesiastical authorities elsewhere; but, for the most part, there was little to be done.

The Pope, however, had the satisfaction of knowing that, with incredible difficulty, a little progress had been made towards the reorganisation of the hierarchy in all countries.

Bishops were being consecrated freely; there were not less than two thousand of them all told, and of priests an unknown number.

The Order of Christ Crucified was doing excellent work, and the tales of not less than four hundred martyrdoms had reached Nazareth during the last two months, accomplished mostly at the hands of the mobs.

In other respects, also, as well as in the primary object of the Order’s existence (namely, the affording of an opportunity to all who loved God to dedicate themselves to Him more perfectly), the new Religious were doing good work.

The more perilous tasks--the work of communication between prelates, missions to persons of suspected integrity--all the business, in fact, which was carried on now at the vital risk of the agent were entrusted solely to members of the Order.

Stringent instructions had been issued from Nazareth that no bishop was to expose himself unnecessarily; each was to regard himself as the heart of his diocese to be protected at all costs save that of Christian honour, and in consequence each had surrounded himself with a group of the new Religious--men and women--who with extraordinary and generous obedience undertook such dangerous tasks as they were capable of performing.

It was plain enough by now that had it not been for the Order, the Church would have been little better than paralysed under these new conditions.

Extraordinary facilities were being issued in all directions.

Every priest who belonged to the Order received universal jurisdiction subject to the bishop, if any, of the diocese in which he might be; mass might be said on any day of the year of the Five Wounds, or the Resurrection, or Our Lady; and all had the privilege of the portable altar, now permitted to be wood.

Further ritual requirements were relaxed; mass might be said with any decent vessels of any material capable of destruction, such as glass or china; bread of any description might be used; and no vestments were obligatory except the thin thread that now represented the stole; lights were non-essential; none need wear the clerical habit; and rosary, even without beads, was always permissible instead of the Office.

In this manner priests were rendered capable of giving the sacraments and offering the holy sacrifice at the least possible risk to themselves; and these relaxations had already proved of enormous benefit in the European prisons, where by this time many thousands of Catholics were undergoing the penalty of refusing public worship.

* * * * * The Pope’s private life was as simple as His room.

He had one Syrian priest for His chaplain, and two Syrian servants.

He said His mass each morning, Himself wearing vestments and His white habit beneath, and heard a mass after.

He then took His coffee, after changing into the tunic and burnous of the country, and spent the morning over business.

He dined at noon, slept, and rode out, for the country by reason of its indeterminate position was still in the simplicity of a hundred years ago.

He returned at dusk, supped, and worked again till late into the night.

That was all.

His chaplain sent what messages were necessary to Damascus; His servants, themselves ignorant of His dignity, dealt with the secular world so far as was required, and the utmost that seemed to be known to His few neighbours was that there lived in the late Sheikh’s little house on the hill an eccentric European with a telegraph office.

His servants, themselves devout Catholics, knew Him for a bishop, but no more than that.

They were told only that there was yet a Pope alive, and with that and the sacraments were content.

To sum up, therefore--the Catholic world knew that their Pope lived under the name of Silvester; and thirteen persons of the entire human race knew that Franklin had been His name, and that the throne of Peter rested for the time in Nazareth.

It was, as a Frenchman had said, just a hundred years ago.

Catholicism survived; but no more.

III

And as for His inner life, what can be said of that?

He lay now back in his wooden chair, thinking with closed eyes.

He could not have described it consistently even to Himself, for indeed He scarcely knew it: He acted rather than indulged in reflex thought.

But the centre of His position was simple faith.

The Catholic Religion, He knew well enough, gave the only adequate explanation of the universe;

it did not unlock all mysteries, but it unlocked more than any other key known to man; He knew, too, perfectly well, that it was the only system of thought that satisfied man as a whole, and accounted for him in his essential nature.

Further, He saw well enough that the failure of Christianity to unite all men one to another rested not upon its feebleness but its strength; its lines met in eternity, not in time.

Besides, He happened to believe it.

But to this foreground there were other moods whose shifting was out of his control.

In his _exalt_ moods, which came upon Him like a breeze from Paradise, the background was bright with hope and drama--He saw Himself and His companions as Peter and the Apostles must have regarded themselves, as they proclaimed through the world, in temples, slums, market-places and private houses, the faith that was to shake and transform the world.

They had handled the Lord of Life, seen the empty sepulchre, grasped the pierced hands of Him Who was their brother and their God.

It was radiantly true, though not a man believed it; the huge superincumbent weight of incredulity could not disturb a fact that was as the sun in heaven.

Moreover, the very desperateness of the cause was their inspiration.

There was no temptation to lean upon the arm of flesh, for there was none that fought for them but God.

Their nakedness was their armour, their slow tongues their persuasiveness, their weakness demanded God’s strength, and found it.

Yet there was this difference, and it was a significant one.

For Peter the spiritual world had an interpretation and a guarantee in the outward events he had witnessed.

He had handled the Risen Christ, the external corroborated the internal.

But for Silvester it was not so.

For Him it was necessary so to grasp spiritual truths in the supernatural sphere that the external events of the Incarnation were proved by rather than proved the certitude of His spiritual apprehension.

Certainly, historically speaking, Christianity was true--proved by its records--yet to see that needed illumination.

He apprehended the power of the Resurrection, therefore Christ was risen.

Therefore in heavier moods it was different with him.

There were periods, lasting sometimes for days together, clouding Him when He awoke, stifling Him as He tried to sleep, dulling the very savour of the Sacrament and the thrill of the Precious Blood; times in which the darkness was so intolerable that even the solid objects of faith attenuated themselves to shadow, when half His nature was blind not only to Christ, but to God Himself, and the reality of His own existence--when His own awful dignity seemed as the insignia of a fool.

And was it conceivable, His earthly mind demanded, that He and His college of twelve and His few thousands should be right, and the entire consensus of the civilised world wrong?

It was not that the world had not heard the message of the Gospel; it had heard little else for two thousand years, and now pronounced it false--false in its external credentials, and false therefore in its spiritual claims.

It was a lost cause for which He suffered; He was not the last of an august line, He was the smoking wick of a candle of folly; He was the _reductio ad absurdam_ of a ludicrous syllogism based on impossible premises.

He was not worth killing, He and His company of the insane--they were no more than the crowned dunces of the world’s school.

Sanity sat on the solid benches of materialism.

And this heaviness waxed so dark sometimes that He almost persuaded Himself that His faith was gone; the clamours of mind so loud that the whisper of the heart was unheard, the desires for earthly peace so fierce that supernatural ambitions were silenced--so dense was the gloom, that, hoping against hope, believing against knowledge, and loving against truth, He cried as One other had cried on another day like this--_Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani!

_ ...

But that, at least, He never failed to cry.

One thing alone gave Him power to go on, so far at least as His consciousness was concerned, and that was His meditation.

He had travelled far in the mystical life since His agonies of effort.

Now He used no deliberate descents into the spiritual world: He threw, as it were, His hands over His head, and dropped into spacelessness.

Consciousness would draw Him up, as a cork, to the surface, but He would do no more than repeat His action, until by that cessation of activity, which is the supreme energy, He floated in the twilight realm of transcendence; and there God would deal with Him--now by an articulate sentence, now by a sword of pain, now by an air like the vivifying breath of the sea.

Sometimes after Communion He would treat Him so, sometimes as He fell asleep, sometimes in the whirl of work.

Yet His consciousness did not seem to retain for long such experiences; five minutes later, it might be, He would be wrestling once more with the all but sensible phantoms of the mind and the heart.

There He lay, then, in the chair, revolving the intolerable blasphemies that He had read.

His white hair was thin upon His browned temples, His hands were as the hands of a spirit, and His young face lined and patched with sorrow.

His bare feet protruded from beneath His stained tunic, and His old brown burnous lay on the floor beside Him....

It was an hour before He moved, and the sun had already lost half its fierceness, when the steps of the horses sounded in the paved court outside.

Then He sat up, slipped His feet into their shoes, and lifted the burnous from the floor, as the door opened and the lean sun-burned priest came through.

“The horses, Holiness,” said the man.

* * * * * The Pope spoke not one word that afternoon, until the two came towards sunset up the bridle-path that leads between Thabor and Nazareth.

They had taken their usual round through Cana, mounting a hillock from which the long mirror of Gennesareth could be seen, and passing on, always bearing to the right, under the shadow of Thabor until once more Esdraelon spread itself beneath like a grey-green carpet, a vast circle, twenty miles across, sprinkled sparsely with groups of huts, white walls and roofs, with Nain visible on the other side, Carmel heaving its long form far off on the right, and Nazareth nestling a mile or two away on the plateau on which they had halted.

It was a sight of extraordinary peace, and seemed an extract from some old picture-book designed centuries ago.

Here was no crowd of roofs, no pressure of hot humanity, no terrible evidences of civilisation and manufactory and strenuous, fruitless effort.

A few tired Jews had come back to this quiet little land, as old people may return to their native place, with no hope of renewing their youth, or refinding their ideals, but with a kind of sentimentality that prevails so often over more logical motives, and a few more barrack-like houses had been added here and there to the obscure villages in sight.

But it was very much as it had been a hundred years ago.

The plain was half shadowed by Carmel, and half in dusty golden light.

Overhead the clear Eastern sky was flushed with rose, as it had flushed for Abraham, Jacob, and the Son of David.

There was no little cloud here, as a man’s hand, over the sea, charged with both promise and terror; no sound of chariot-wheels from earth or heaven, no vision of heavenly horses such as a young man had seen thirty centuries ago in this very sky.

Here was the old earth and the old heaven, unchanged and unchangeable; the patient, returning spring had starred the thin soil with flowers of Bethlehem, and those glorious lilies to which Solomon’s scarlet garments might not be compared.

There was no whisper from the Throne as when Gabriel had once stooped through this very air to hail Her who was blessed among women, no breath of promise or hope beyond that which God sends through every movement of His created robe of life.

As the two halted, and the horses looked out with steady, inquisitive eyes at the immensity of light and air beneath them, a soft hooting cry broke out, and a shepherd passed below along the hillside a hundred yards away, trailing his long shadow behind him, and to the mellow tinkle of bells his flock came after, a troop of obedient sheep and wilful goats, cropping and following and cropping again as they went on to the fold, called by name in that sad minor voice of him who knew each, and led instead of driving.

The soft clanking grew fainter, the shadow of the shepherd shot once to their very feet, as he topped the rise, and vanished again as he stepped down once more; and the call grew fainter yet, and ceased.

* * * * * The Pope lifted His hand to His eyes for an instant, then smoothed it down His face.

He nodded across to a dim patch of white walls glimmering through the violet haze of the falling twilight.

“That place, father,” He said, “what is its name?

” The Syrian priest looked across, back once more at the Pope, and across again.

“That among the palms, Holiness?

” “Yes.

” “That is Megiddo,” he said.

“Some call it Armageddon.

” CHAPTER II I

At twenty-three o’clock that night the Syrian priest went out to watch for the coming of the messenger from Tiberias.

Nearly two hours previously he had heard the cry of the Russian volor that plied from Damascus to Tiberias, and Tiberias to Jerusalem, and even as it was the messenger was a little late.

These were very primitive arrangements, but Palestine was out of the world--a slip of useless country--and it was necessary for a man to ride from Tiberias to Nazareth each night with papers from Cardinal Corkran to the Pope, and to return with correspondence.

It was a dangerous task, and the members of the New Order who surrounded the Cardinal undertook it by turns.

In this manner all matters for which the Pope’s personal attention was required, and which were too long and not too urgent, could be dealt with at leisure by him, and an answer returned within the twenty-four hours.

It was a brilliant moonlit night.

The great golden shield was riding high above Thabor, shedding its strange metallic light down the long slopes and over the moor-like country that rose up from before the house-door--casting too heavy black shadows that seemed far more concrete and solid than the brilliant pale surfaces of the rock slabs or even than the diamond flashes from the quartz and crystal that here and there sparkled up the stony pathway.

Compared with this clear splendour, the yellow light from the shuttered house seemed a hot and tawdry thing;

and the priest, leaning against the door-post, his eyes alone alight in his dark face, sank down at last with a kind of Eastern sensuousness to bathe himself in the glory, and to spread his lean, brown hands out to it.

This was a very simple man, in faith as well as in life.

For him there were neither the ecstasies nor the desolations of his master.

It was an immense and solemn joy to him to live here at the spot of God’s Incarnation and in attendance upon His Vicar.

As regarded the movements of the world, he observed them as a man in a ship watches the heaving of the waves far beneath.

Of course the world was restless, he half perceived, for, as the Latin Doctor had said, all hearts were restless until they found their rest in God.

_Quare fremuerunt gentes?...

Adversus Dominum, et adversus Christum ejus!

_ As to the end--he was not greatly concerned.

It might well be that the ship would be overwhelmed, but the moment of the catastrophe would be the end of all things earthly.

The gates of hell shall not prevail: when Rome falls, the world falls; and when the world falls, Christ is manifest in power.

For himself, he imagined that the end was not far away.

When he had named Megiddo this afternoon it had been in his mind; to him it seemed natural that at the consummation of all things Christ’s Vicar should dwell at Nazareth where His King had come on earth--and that the Armageddon of the Divine John should be within sight of the scene where Christ had first taken His earthly sceptre and should take it again.

After all, it would not be the first battle that Megiddo had seen.

Israel and Amalek had met here; Israel and Assyria; Sesostris had ridden here and Sennacherib.

Christian and Turk had contended here, like Michael and Satan, over the place where God’s Body had lain.

As to the exact method of that end, he had no clear views; it would be a battle of some kind, and what field could be found more evidently designed for that than this huge flat circular plain of Esdraelon, twenty miles across, sufficient to hold all the armies of the earth in its embrace?

To his view once more, ignorant as he was of present statistics, the world was divided into two large sections, Christians and heathens, and he supposed them very much of a size.

Something would happen, troops would land at Khaifa, they would stream southwards from Tiberias, Damascus and remote Asia, northwards from Jerusalem, Egypt and Africa; eastwards from Europe; westwards from Asia again and the far-off Americas.

And, surely, the time could not be far away, for here was Christ’s Vicar; and, as He Himself had said in His gospel of the Advent, _Ubicumque fuerit corpus, illie congregabuntur et aquilae.

_ Of more subtle interpretations of prophecy he had no knowledge.

For him words were things, not merely labels upon ideas.

What Christ and St. Paul and St. John had said--these things were so.

He had escaped, owing chiefly to his isolation from the world, that vast expansion of Ritschlian ideas that during the last century had been responsible for the desertion by so many of any intelligible creed.

For others this had been the supreme struggle--the difficulty of decision between the facts that words were not things, and yet that the things they represented were in themselves objective.

But to this man, sitting now in the moonlight, listening to the far-off tap of hoofs over the hill as the messenger came up from Cana, faith was as simple as an exact science.

Here Gabriel had descended on wide feathered wings from the Throne of God set beyond the stars, the Holy Ghost had breathed in a beam of ineffable light, the Word had become Flesh as Mary folded her arms and bowed her head to the decree of the Eternal.

And here once more, he thought, though it was no more than a guess--yet he thought that already the running of chariot-wheels was audible--the tumult of the hosts of God gathering about the camp of the saints--he thought that already beyond the bars of the dark Gabriel set to his lips the trumpet of doom and heaven was astir.

He might be wrong at this time, as others had been wrong at other times, but neither he nor they could be wrong for ever; there must some day be an end to the patience of God, even though that patience sprang from the eternity of His nature.

He stood up, as down the pale moonlit path a hundred yards away came a pale figure of one who rode, with a leather bag strapped to his girdle.

II

It would be about three o’clock in the morning that the priest awoke in his little mud-walled room next to that of the Holy Father’s, and heard a footstep coming up the stairs.

Last evening he had left his master as usual beginning to open the pile of letters arrived from Cardinal Corkran, and himself had gone straight to his bed and slept.

He lay now a moment or two, still drowsy, listening to the pad of feet, and an instant later sat up abruptly, for a deliberate tap had sounded on the door.

Again it came; he sprang out of bed in his long night-tunic, drew it up hastily in his girdle, went to the door and opened it.

The Pope was standing there, with a little lamp in one hand, for the dawn had scarcely yet begun, and a paper in the other.

“I beg your pardon, Father; but there is a message I must have sent at once to his Eminence.

” Together they went out through the Pope’s room, the priest, still half-blind with sleep, passed up the stairs, and emerged into the clear cold air of the upper roof.

The Pope blew out His lamp, and set it on the parapet.

“You will be cold, Father; fetch your cloak.

” “And you, Holiness?

” The other made a little gesture of denial, and went across to the tiny temporary shed where the wireless telegraphic instrument stood.

“Fetch your cloak, Father,” He said again over His shoulder.

“I will ring up meanwhile.

” When the priest came back three minutes later, in his slippers and cloak, carrying another cloak also for his master, the Pope was still seated at the table.

He did not even move His head as the other came up, but once more pressed on the lever that, communicating with the twelve-foot pole that rose through the pent-house overhead, shot out the quivering energy through the eighty miles of glimmering air that lay between Nazareth and Damascus.

This simple priest had scarcely even by now become accustomed to this extraordinary device invented a century ago and perfected through all those years to this precise exactness--that device by which with the help of a stick, a bundle of wires, and a box of wheels, something, at last established to be at the root of all matter, if not at the very root of physical life, spoke across the spaces of the world to a tiny receiver tuned by a hair’s breadth to the vibration with which it was set in relations.

The air was surprisingly cold, considering the heat that had preceded and would follow it, and the priest shivered a little as he stood clear of the roof, and stared, now at the motionless figure in the chair before him, now at the vast vault of the sky passing, even as he looked, from a cold colourless luminosity to a tender tint of yellow, as far away beyond Thabor and Moab the dawn began to deepen.

From the village half-a-mile away arose the crowing of a cock, thin and brazen as a trumpet; a dog barked once and was silent again; and then, on a sudden, a single stroke upon a bell hung in the roof recalled him in an instant, and told him that his work was to begin.

The Pope pressed the lever again at the sound, twice, and then, after a pause, once more--waited a moment for an answer, and then when it came, rose and signed to the priest to take his place.

The Syrian sat down, handing the extra cloak to his master, and waited until the other had settled Himself in a chair set in such a position at the side of the table that the face of each was visible to the other.

Then he waited, with his brown fingers poised above the row of keys, looking at the other’s face as He arranged himself to speak.

That face, he thought, looking out from the hood, seemed paler than ever in this cold light of dawn; the black arched eyebrows accentuated this, and even the steady lips, preparing to speak, seemed white and bloodless.

He had His paper in His hand, and His eyes were fixed upon this.

“Make sure it is the Cardinal,” he said abruptly.

The priest tapped off an enquiry, and, with moving lips, raid off the printed message, as like magic it precipitated itself on to the tall white sheet of paper that faced him.

“It is his Eminence, Holiness,” he said softly.

“He is alone at the instrument.

” “Very well.

Now then; begin.

” “We have received your Eminence’s letter, and have noted the news....

It should have been forwarded by telegraphy--why was that not done?

” The voice paused, and the priest who had snapped off the message, more quickly than a man could write it, read aloud the answer.

“‘I did not understand that it was urgent.

I thought it was but one more assault.

I had intended to communicate more so soon as I heard more.

”’ “Of course it was urgent,” came the voice again in the deliberate intonation that was used between these two in the case of messages for transmission.

“Remember that all news of this kind is always urgent.

” “‘I will remember,’ read the priest.

‘I regret my mistake.

’” “You tell us,” went on the Pope, His eyes still downcast on the paper, “that this measure is decided upon; you name only three authorities.

Give me, now, all the authorities you have, if you have more.

” There was a moment’s pause.

Then the priest began to read off the names.

“Besides the three Cardinals whose names I sent, the Archbishops of Thibet, Cairo, Calcutta and Sydney have all asked if the news was true, and for directions if it is true; besides others whose names I can communicate if I may leave the table for a moment.

’” “Do so,” said the Pope.

Again there was a pause.

Then once more the names began.

“‘The Bishops of Bukarest, the Marquesas Islands and Newfoundland.

The Franciscans in Japan, the Crutched Friars in Morocco, the Archbishops of Manitoba and Portland, and the Cardinal-Archbisbop of Pekin.

I have despatched two members of Christ Crucified to England.

’” “Tell us when the news first arrived, and how.

” “‘I was called up to the instrument yesterday evening at about twenty o’clock.

The Archbishop of Sydney was asking, through our station at Bombay, whether the news was true.

I replied I had heard nothing of it.

Within ten minutes four more inquiries had come to the same effect; and three minutes later Cardinal Ruspoli sent the positive news from Turin.

This was accompanied by a similar message from Father Petrovski in Moscow.

Then--- ’” “Stop.

Why did not Cardinal Dolgorovski communicate it?

” “‘He did communicate it three hours later.

’” “Why not at once?

” “‘His Eminence had not heard it.

’” “Find out at what hour the news reached Moscow--not now, but within the day.

” “‘I will.

’” “Go on, then.

” “‘Cardinal Malpas communicated it within five minutes of Cardinal Ruspoli, and the rest of the inquiries arrived before midnight.

China reported it at twenty-three.

’” “Then when do you suppose the news was made public?

” “‘It was decided first at the secret London conference, yesterday, at about sixteen o’clock by our time.

The Plenipotentiaries appear to have signed it at that hour.

After that it was communicated to the world.

It was published here half an hour past midnight.

’” “Then Felsenburgh was in London?