analytically. Hitherto he had regarded the Church as a
skilfully-adjusted engine, the product of human passions scientifically
combined to obtain the greatest sum of tangible results. Now he saw that
he had never penetrated beneath the surface. For the Church which
grasped, contrived, calculated, struggled for temporal possessions and
used material weapons against spiritual foes--this outer Church was
nothing more than the body, which, like any other animal body, had to
care for its own gross needs, nourish, clothe, defend itself, fight for
a footing among the material resistances of life--while the soul, the
inner animating principle, might dwell aloof from all these things, in a
clear medium of its own.

To this soul of the Church his daily life now brought him close. He felt
it in the ordered beneficence of the great community, in the simplicity
of its external life and the richness and suavity of its inner
relations. No alliance based on material interests, no love of power
working toward a common end, could have created that harmony of thought
and act which was reflected in every face about him. Each of these men
seemed to have FOUND OUT SOMETHING of which he was still ignorant.

What it was, de Crucis tried to tell him as they paced the cloisters
together or sat in the warm stillness of the budding garden. At the
first news of the Duke's illness the Jesuit had hastened to Pianura. No
companionship could have been so satisfying to Odo. De Crucis's mental
attitude toward mankind might have been defined as an illuminated
charity. To love men, or to understand them, is not as unusual as to do
both together; and it was the intellectual acuteness of his friend's
judgments that made their Christian amenity so seductive to Odo.

"The highest claim of Christianity," the Jesuit said one morning, as
they sat on a worn stone bench at the end of the sunny vine-walk, "is
that it has come nearer to solving the problem of men's relations to
each other than any system invented by themselves. This, after all, is
the secret principle of the Church's vitality. She gave a spiritual
charter of equality to mankind long before the philosophers thought of
giving them a material one. If, all the while, she has been fighting for
dominion, arrogating to herself special privileges, struggling to
preserve the old lines of social and legal demarcation, it has been
because for nigh two thousand years she has cherished in her breast the
one fre