h the very alphabet,
increased as knowledge was acquired, and burst forth with those _resumes_
of the physical, chemical, and natural sciences which bring the very
Creation, as described by Holy Writ, into question. However, the Index
dared not attempt to suppress those humble volumes, those terrible
soldiers of truth, those destroyers of faith. What was the use, then, of
all the money which Leo XIII drew from his hidden treasure of the Peter's
Pence to subvention Catholic schools, with the thought of forming the
believing generations which the papacy needed to enable it to conquer?
What was the use of that precious money if it was only to serve for the
purchase of similar insignificant yet formidable volumes, which could
never be sufficiently "cooked" and expurgated, but would always contain
too much Science, that growing Science which one day would blow up both
Vatican and St. Peter's? Ah! that idiotic and impotent Index, what
wretchedness and what derision!

Then, when Pierre had placed Theophile Morin's book in his valise, he
once more returned to the window, and while leaning out, beheld an
extraordinary vision. Under the cloudy, coppery sky, in the mild and
mournful night, patches of wavy mist had risen, hiding many of the
house-roofs with trailing shreds which looked like shrouds. Entire
edifices had disappeared, and he imagined that the times were at last
accomplished, and that truth had at last destroyed St. Peter's dome. In a
hundred or a thousand years, it would be like that, fallen, obliterated
from the black sky. One day, already, he had felt it tottering and
cracking beneath him, and had foreseen that this temple of Catholicism
would fall even as Jove's temple had fallen on the Capitol. And it was
over now, the dome had strewn the ground with fragments, and all that
remained standing, in addition to a portion of the apse, where five
columns of the central nave, still upholding a shred of entablature, and
four cyclopean buttress-piers on which the dome had rested--piers which
still arose, isolated and superb, looking indestructible among all the
surrounding downfall. But a denser mist flowed past, another thousand
years no doubt went by, and then nothing whatever remained. The apse, the
last pillars, the giant piers themselves were felled! The wind had swept
away their dust, and it would have been necessary to search the soil
beneath the brambles and the nettles to find a few fragments of broken
statues, ma