crime your 'authorities' introduced a police agent in
disguise to draw him into a denunciation of his accomplice?"

"These are matters of state, your Holiness. I do not assert them and I
do not deny."

"In the name of humanity I ask you are such 'authorities' punished, or
do they sit in the cabinets of your Ministers of the Interior?"

"No doubt the officials went too far, your Holiness; but shall we, for
the sake of a miserable malefactor who told one story to-day and another
to-morrow, drag our public service through courts of law? Pity for such
persons is morbid sentimentality, your Holiness, unworthy of a strong
and enlightened Government."

"Then God destroy all such Governments, sir, and the bad and unchristian
system which supports them! Allow that the man _was_ a miserable
malefactor, it was not he alone that was offended, but in his poor,
degraded person the spirit of Justice. What did your 'authorities' do?
They tortured the man by his love for his wife, by the memory of his
murdered child, by all that was true and noble and divine in him. They
crucified the Christ in that helpless man, and you stand here in the
presence of the Vicar of Christ to excuse and defend them."

The Pope had risen in his chair and lifted one hand over his head with a
majestic gesture. Involuntarily the young King, who had been ashen pale
for some moments, dropped to his knees, but the Baron only folded his
arms and stiffened his legs.

"Have you ever thought, sir, of the end of the unjust Minister? Think of
his dying hour, tortured with the memory of young lives dissolved,
mothers dead, widows desolate, and orphans in tears. Think of the day
after his death, when he who has passed through the world like the
scourge of God lies at its feet, and no one so mean but he may spurn the
dishonoured carcass. You are aiming high, your Excellency, but beware,
beware!"

The Pope sat, and the King rose to his feet.

"Your Majesty," said the Pope, "the day will come when we must both
present ourselves before God to render to Him an account of our deeds,
and I, being far more advanced in years, will assuredly be the first.
But I would not dare to meet the eye of my Judge if I did not this day
warn you of the dangers in which you stand. Only God knows by what
inscrutable decree of Providence one man is made a Pope or a King, while
another man, his equal or superior, is made a beggar or a slave. But God
who made Popes and Kings meant them to