least he suspected that, after the beholding of it, he
could never again be altogether as he had been before.

NOTES

93. +Emanuel Swedenborg, Swedish mystic writer, 1688-1772. Return.

CHAPTER XXII: "THE MINOR PEACE OF THE CHURCH"

[109] FAITHFUL to the spirit of his early Epicurean philosophy and the
impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to
anything that, as a matter of fact, attracted or impressed him
strongly, Marius informed himself with much pains concerning the church
in Cecilia's house; inclining at first to explain the peculiarities of
that place by the establishment there of the schola or common hall of
one of those burial-guilds, which then covered so much of the
unofficial, and, as it might be called, subterranean enterprise of
Roman society.

And what he found, thus looking, literally, for the dead among the
living, was the vision of a natural, a scrupulously natural, love,
transforming, by some new gift of insight into the truth of human
relationships, and under the urgency of some new motive by him so far
unfathomable, all the conditions of life. He saw, in all its primitive
freshness and amid the lively facts of its actual coming into the
world, as a reality of [110] experience, that regenerate type of
humanity, which, centuries later, Giotto and his successors, down to
the best and purest days of the young Raphael, working under conditions
very friendly to the imagination, were to conceive as an artistic
ideal. He felt there, felt amid the stirring of some wonderful new
hope within himself, the genius, the unique power of Christianity; in
exercise then, as it has been exercised ever since, in spite of many
hindrances, and under the most inopportune circumstances.
Chastity,--as he seemed to understand--the chastity of men and women,
amid all the conditions, and with the results, proper to such chastity,
is the most beautiful thing in the world and the truest conservation of
that creative energy by which men and women were first brought into it.
The nature of the family, for which the better genius of old Rome
itself had sincerely cared, of the family and its appropriate
affections--all that love of one's kindred by which obviously one does
triumph in some degree over death--had never been so felt before.
Here, surely! in its genial warmth, its jealous exclusion of all that
was opposed to it, to its own immaculate naturalness, in the hedge set
around the sacred