cess seemed to have been at work upon the mind of
the man who had lost his memory, since his interview with the
monk immediately after the trial. At first a kind of numbness had
descended upon him. He had gone back to his business, his
correspondence, his interviews, his daily consultation with the
Cardinal, and had conducted all these things efficiently enough.
Yet, underneath, the situation arranged itself steadily and
irresistibly. It had become impressed upon him that, whether for
good or evil, the world was as it was; that Christian
civilization had taken the form which he perceived round him, and
that to struggle against it was as futile, from a mental point of
view, as to resent the physical laws of the universe. Nothing
followed upon such resistance except intense discomfort to
oneself. It might be insupportably unjust that one could not fly
without wings, yet the fact remained. It might be intolerably
unchristian that a tonsured clerk should be put to death for
heresy, yet he was put to death, and not a soul, it seemed (not
even the victim himself) resented it. Dom Adrian's protest had
been not against the execution of heretics, but against the
statement that he was a heretic. But he had refused to submit to
a decision which he acknowledged as authoritative, and found no
fault therefore with the consequence of such refusal. The
condemnation, he granted, was perfectly legal and therefore
extrinsically lust; and it was the penalty he had to pay for an
individualism which the responsible authorities of the State
regarded as dangerous to the conditions on which society rested.
And the rest was the business of the State, not of the Church.

The scheme then was beginning to grow clear to this man's
indignant eyes. Even the "repression" of the Socialists fitted
in, logically and inexorably. And he began to understand a little
more what Dom Adrian had meant. There stood indeed, imminent over
the world (whether ideally or actually was another question) a
tremendous Figure that was already even more Judge than
Saviour--a Personality that already had the Power and reigned;
one to whose feet all the world crept in silence, who spoke
ordinarily and normally through His Vicar on earth, who was
represented on this or that plane by that court or the other; one
who was literally a King of kings; to whose model all must be
conformed; to whose final judgment every creature might appeal if
he would but face that death through w