CHAPTER V.THE RENUNCIATION OF THE PURPLE.
At the Consistory of June 19, 1497 the Sacred College beheld a broken-hearted old man who declared that he had done with the world, and that henceforth life could offer him nothing that should endear it to him.
"A greater sorrow than this could not be ours, for we loved him exceedingly, and now we can hold neither the Papacy nor any other thing as of concern.

Had we seven Papacies, we would give them all to restore the duke to life." So ran his bitter lament.
He denounced his course of life as not having been all that it should have been, and appeared to see in the murder of his son a punishment for the evil of his ways.

Much has been made of this, and quite unnecessarily.

It has been taken eagerly as an admission of his unparalleled guilt.

An admission of guilt it undoubtedly was; but what man is not guilty?
and how many men--ay, and saints even--in the hour of tribulation have cried out that they were being made to feel the wrath of God for the sins that no man is without?
If humanity contains a type that would not have seen in such a cause for sorrow a visitation of God, it is the type of inhuman monster to which we are asked to believe that Alexander VI belonged.