altogether as he had been before.

NOTES

93. +Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish mystic writer, 1688-1772. Return.



CHAPTER XXII: "THE MINOR PEACE OF THE CHURCH"

[109] FAITHFUL to the spirit of his early Epicurean philosophy and
the impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry about
it, to anything that, as a matter of fact, attracted or impressed him
strongly, Marius informed himself with much pains concerning the
church in Cecilia's house; inclining at first to explain the
peculiarities of that place by the establishment there of the schola
or common hall of one of those burial-guilds, which then covered so
much of the unofficial, and, as it might be called, subterranean
enterprise of Roman society.

And what he found, thus looking, literally, for the dead among the
living, was the vision of a natural, a scrupulously natural, love,
transforming, by some new gift of insight into the truth of human
relationships, and under the urgency of some new motive by him so far
unfathomable, all the conditions of life. He saw, in all its
primitive freshness and amid the lively facts of its actual coming
into the world, as a reality of [110] experience, that regenerate
type of humanity, which, centuries later, Giotto and his successors,
down to the best and purest days of the young Raphael, working under
conditions very friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an