d him that
he could not rest until he imparted it to his fellows. He preached
righteousness,--the supremacy of conduct over ritual,--love as the test
and goal of life; but always with full acknowledgment of Mother
Church as the way of salvation. Indeed, he seems neither to doubt the
impregnability of the foundations of Christianity, nor the validity of
the Petrine corner-stone; taking these for granted he aims to live the
Christian life in every act, in every thought. The superstructure--the
practices of the Catholic Church to-day, the failures and sins of
clerical society, the rigid ecclesiasticism--these he must in loyalty
to fundamental truth, criticise, and if need be, condemn, where they
interfere with the exercise of pure religion. But Benedetto engages very
little in controversy; his method is to glorify the good, sure that the
good requires only to be revealed in all its beauty and charm in order
to draw irresistibly to itself souls that, for lack of vision, have been
pursuing the mediocre or the bad.

Yet these utterances, so natural to Benedetto, awaken the suspicions of
his superiors, who--we cannot say without cause--scent heresy in them.
Good works, righteous conduct--what are these in comparison with blind
subscription to orthodox formulas? Benedetto is persecuted not by an
obviously brutal or sanguinary persecution,--although it might have
come to that except for a catastrophe of another sort,--but by the
very finesse of persecution. The sagacious politicians of the Vatican,
inheritors of the accumulated craft of a thousand years, know too much
to break a butterfly on a wheel, to make a martyr of an inconvenient
person whom they can be rid of quietly. Therein lies the tragedy of
Benedetto's experience, so far at least as we regard him, or as he
thought himself, an instrument for the regeneration of the Church.

On the face of it, therefore, _The Saint_ is the story of a man with a
passion for doing good, in the most direct and human way, who found the
Church in which he believed, the Church which existed ostensibly to do
good according to the direct and human ways of Jesus Christ, thwarting
him at every step. Here is a conflict, let us remark in passing, worthy
to be the theme of a great tragedy. Does not _Antigone_ rest on a
similar conflict between Antigone's simple human way of showing her
sisterly affection and the rigid formalism of the orthodoxy of her day?

V

Or, look next at _The Saint_ as