dictates of his heart and can only have transgressed by excess of love
for the disinherited of the world!"

Leo XIII made no reply. He had again raised his superb eyes, those eyes
of ardent life, set, as it were, in the motionless countenance of an
alabaster idol; and once more he was fixedly gazing at the young priest.

And Pierre, amidst his returning feverishness, seemed to behold him
growing in power and splendour, whilst behind him arose a vision of the
ages, a vision of that long line of popes whom the young priest had
previously evoked, the saintly and the proud ones, the warriors and the
ascetics, the theologians and the diplomatists, those who had worn
armour, those who had conquered by the Cross, those who had disposed of
empires as of mere provinces which God had committed to their charge. And
in particular Pierre beheld the great Gregory, the conqueror and founder,
and Sixtus V, the negotiator and politician, who had first foreseen the
eventual victory of the papacy over all the vanquished monarchies. Ah!
what a throng of magnificent princes, of sovereign masters with powerful
brains and arms, there was behind that pale, motionless, old man! What an
accumulation of inexhaustible determination, stubborn genius, and
boundless domination! The whole history of human ambition, the whole
effort of the ages to subject the nations to the pride of one man, the
greatest force that has ever conquered, exploited, and fashioned mankind
in the name of its happiness! And even now, when territorial sovereignty
had come to an end, how great was the spiritual sovereignty of that pale
and slender old man, in whose presence women fainted, as if overcome by
the divine splendour radiating from his person. Not only did all the
resounding glories, the masterful triumphs of history spread out behind
him, but heaven opened, the very spheres beyond life shone out in their
dazzling mystery. He--the Pope--stood at the portals of heaven, holding