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 free city of the spirit, because to guard its liberties she has had
to defend and strengthen her own position. I do not ask you to consider
whence comes this insight into the needs of man, this mysterious power
over him; I ask you simply to confess them in their results.
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