ieved against the background of flame
and smoke which Christianity had raised for fleshly sins, is
justifiable. His spiritual tyranny, that arrogated Jus, by right of
which he claimed the hemisphere revealed by Christopher Columbus, and
imposed upon the press of Europe the censure of the Church of Rome, was
rendered ten times monstrous by the glare reflected on it from the
unquenched furnace of a godless life. The universal conscience of
Christianity is revolted by those unnamable delights, orgies of blood
and festivals of lust, which were enjoyed in the plenitude of his green
and vigorous old age by this versatile diplomatist and subtle priest,
who controlled the councils of kings, and who chanted the sacramental
service for a listening world on Easter Day in Rome. Rome has never been
small or weak or mediocre. And now in the Pontificate of Alexander 'that
memorable scene' presented to the nations of the modern world a pageant
of Antichrist and Antiphysis--the negation of the Gospel and of nature;
a glaring spectacle of discord between humanity as it aspires to be at
its best, and humanity as it is at its worst; a tragi-comedy composed by
some infernal Aristophanes, in which the servant of servants, the
anointed of the Lord, the lieutenant upon earth of Christ, played the
chief part. It may be objected that this is the language not of history
but of the legend. I reply that there are occasions when the legend has
caught the spirit of the truth.

Alexander was a stronger and a firmer man than his immediate
predecessors. 'He combined,' says Guicciardini, 'craft with singular
sagacity, a sound judgment with extraordinary powers of persuasion; and
to all the grave affairs of life he applied ability and pains beyond
belief.'[1] His first care was to reduce Rome to order. The old
factions of Colonna and Orsini, which Sixtus had scotched, but which had
raised their heads again during the dotage of Innocent, were destroyed
in his Pontificate. In this way, as Machiavelli observed,[2] he laid the
real basis for the temporal power of the Papacy. Alexander, indeed, as a
sovereign, achieved for the Papal See what Louis XI. had done for the
throne of France, and made Rome on its small scale follow the type of
the large European monarchies. The faithlessness and perjuries of the
Pope, 'who never did aught else but deceive, nor ever thought of
anything but this, and always found occasion for his frauds,'[3] when
combined with his logi