pilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the
enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed."

"Where are the Christians in their panoply?
The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts
Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith?...
Slunk into corners!"

The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant Pompilia back upon the
wolf, the Convent of Convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint,
and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest
life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, Guido's brothers,--it is these
figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old Pope
contemplates them with the "terror" of one who sees his fundamental
assumptions shaken at the root. For here the theory of the Church was
hard to maintain. Not only had the Church, whose mission it was to guide
corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed,
but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural
promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[55]
The blaze of "uncommissioned meteors" had intervened where the
authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of
light. Was Caponsacchi blind?

"Ay, as a man should be inside the sun,
Delirious with the plenitude of light."[56]

[Footnote 55: _The Pope_, 1550 f.]

[Footnote 56: _The Pope_, 1563.]

It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced
home by the author of the _Cenci_ had this other, less famous, "Roman
murder-case" fallen into his hands. The old Godwinian virus would have
found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great
institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls. Yet, though
the Shelleyan affinities of Browning are here visible enough, his point
of view is clearly distinct. The revolutionary animus against
institutions as the sole obstacle to the native goodness of man has
wholly vanished; but of historic or mystic reverence for them he has not
a trace. He parts company with Rousseau without showing the smallest
affinity to Burke. As sources of moral and spiritual growth the State
and the Church do not count. Training and discipline have their relative
worth, but the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral
achievement are won by those alone in whom it breathes the heroism of
aspiration and resolve. His idealists grow for the most part in the
interstices of the