but after his conversion, he had devoured the Scriptures, and studied the books of the Fathers, until the spirit of the early, simple, untheological Church had poured into him. It brought a message of truth which so stirred him that he could not rest until he imparted it to his fellows. He preached righteousness—the supremacy of conduct over ritual—love as the test and goal of life; but always with full acknowledgment of Mother Church as the way of salvation. Indeed, he seems neither to doubt the impregnability of the foundations of Christianity, nor the validity of the Petrine cornerstone; taking these for granted, he aims to live the Christian life in every act, in every thought. The superstructure—the practices of the Catholic Church to-day, the failures and sin of clerical society, the rigid ecclesiasticism—these he must in loyalty to fundamental truths, criticize and, if need be, condemn, where they interfere with the exercise of pure religion. But Benedetto engages very little in controversy; his method is to glorify the good, sure that the good requires only to be revealed in all its beauty and charm in order to draw irresistibly to itself souls that, for lack of vision, have been pursuing the mediocre or the bad.
Yet these utterances, so natural to Benedetto, awaken the suspicions of his superiors, who—we cannot say without cause—scent heresy in them. Good works, righteous conduct—what are these in comparison with blind subscription to orthodox formulas? Benedetto is persecuted not by an obviously brutal or sanguinary persecution—although it might have come to that, except for a catastrophe of another sort—but by the very finesse of persecution. The sagacious politicians of the Vatican, inheritors of the accumulated
