The old Pope mournfully reflects that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church has issued only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect flower, Pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed." "Where are the Christians in their panoply?
The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith ?...
Slunk into corners!" The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant Pompilia back upon the wolf, the Convent of Convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint, and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, Guido's brothers,--it is these figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old Pope contemplates them with the "terror" of one who sees his fundamental assumptions shaken at the root.

For here the theory of the Church was hard to maintain.

Not only had the Church, whose mission it was to guide corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed, but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[55] The blaze of "uncommissioned meteors" had intervened where the authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of light.

Was Caponsacchi blind?
"Ay, as a man should be inside the sun, Delirious with the plenitude of light."[56] [Footnote 55: _The Pope_, 1550 f.] [Footnote 56: _The Pope_, 1563.] It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced home by the author of the _Cenci_ had this other, less famous, "Roman murder-case" fallen into his hands.

The old Godwinian virus would have found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls.