ing the time when they shall be called upon to relinquish their
trust. All the nations, all humanity, and the whole world belong to the
Church to whom they have been given by God. And if real and effective
possession is not hers to-day, this is only because she yields to force,
compelled to face accomplished facts, but with the formal reserve that
she is in presence of guilty usurpation, that her possessions are
unjustly withheld from her, and that she awaits the realisation of the
promises of the Christ, who, when the time shall be accomplished, will
for ever restore to her both the earth and mankind. Such is the real
future city which time is to bring: Catholic Rome, sovereign of the world
once more. And Rome the city forms a substantial part of the dream, Rome
whose eternity has been predicted, Rome whose soil has imparted to
Catholicism the inextinguishable thirst of absolute power. And thus the
destiny of the papacy is linked to that of Rome, to such a point indeed
that a pope elsewhere than at Rome would no longer be a Catholic pope.
The thought of all this frightened Pierre; a great shudder passed through
him as he leant on the light iron balustrade, gazing down into the abyss
where the stern mournful city was even now crumbling away under the
fierce sun.

There was, however, evidence of the facts which had dawned on him. If
Pius IX and Leo XIII had resolved to imprison themselves in the Vatican,
it was because necessity bound them to Rome. A pope is not free to leave
the city, to be the head of the Church elsewhere; and in the same way a
pope, however well he may understand the modern world, has not the right
to relinquish the temporal power. This is an inalienable inheritance
which he must defend, and it is moreover a question of life, peremptory,
above discussion. And thus Leo XIII has retained the title of Master of
the temporal dominions of the Church, and this he has done the more
readily since as a cardinal--like all the members of the Sacred College
when elected--he swore that he would maintain those dominions intact.
Italy may hold Rome as her capital for another century or more, but the
coming popes will never cease to protest and claim their kingdom. If ever
an understanding should be arrived at, it must be based on the gift of a
strip of territory. Formerly, when rumours of reconciliation were
current, was it not said that the papacy exacted, as a formal condition,
the possession of at least the Leonin