But he had never before realised the stupendous, overwhelming fact of the assembly of the world's royalty under the shadow of Peter's Throne, nor the appalling danger that its presence constituted in the midst of a democratic world.

That world, he knew, affected to laugh at the folly and the childishness of it all--at the desperate play-acting of Divine Right on the part of fallen and despised families; but the same world, he knew very well, had not yet lost quite all its sentiment; and if that sentiment should happen to become resentful--- The pressure relaxed; Percy slipped out of the recess, and followed in the slow-moving stream.
Half-an-hour later he was in his place among the ecclesiastics, as the papal procession came out through the glimmering dusk of the chapel of the Blessed Sacrament into the nave of the enormous church; but even before he had entered the chapel he heard the quiet roar of recognition and the cry of the trumpets that greeted the Supreme Pontiff as he came out, a hundred yards ahead, borne on the _sedia gestatoria_, with the fans going behind him.

When Percy himself came out, five minutes later, walking in his quaternion, and saw the sight that was waiting, he remembered with a sudden throb at his heart that other sight he had seen in London in a summer dawn three months before....
Far ahead, seeming to cleave its way through the surging heads, like the poop of an ancient ship, moved the canopy beneath which sat the Lord of the world, and between him and the priest, as if it were the wake of that same ship, swayed the gorgeous procession--Protonotaries Apostolic, Generals of Religious Orders and the rest--making its way along with white, gold, scarlet and silver foam between the living banks on either side.

Overhead hung the splendid barrel of the roof, and far in front the haven of God's altar reared its monstrous pillars, beneath which burned the seven yellow stars that were the harbour lights of sanctity.
It was an astonishing sight, but too vast and bewildering to do anything but oppress the observers with a consciousness of their own futility.
The enormous enclosed air, the giant statues, the dim and distant roofs, the indescribable concert of sound--of the movement of feet, the murmur of ten thousand voices, the peal of organs like the crying of gnats, the thin celestial music--the faint suggestive smell of incense and men and bruised bay and myrtle--and, supreme above all, the vibrant atmosphere of human emotion, shot with supernatural aspiration, as the Hope of the World, the holder of Divine Vice-Royalty, passed on his way to stand between God and man--this affected the priest as the action of a drug that at once lulls and stimulates, that blinds while it gives new vision, that deafens while it opens stopped ears, that exalts while it plunges into new gulfs of consciousness.

Here, then, was the other formulated answer to the problem of life.