He had never deceived himself as to the cause of the riots.  He knew from Gamba and Andreoni that the liberals and the court, for once working in unison, had provoked the blind outburst of fanaticism which a rasher judgment might have ascribed to the clergy.  The Dominicans, bigoted and eager for power, had been ready enough to serve such an end, and some of the begging orders had furnished the necessary points of contact with the people; but the movement was at bottom purely political, and represented the resistance of the privileged classes to any attack on their inherited rights.

As such, he could no longer regard it as completely unreasonable.  He was beginning to feel the social and political significance of those old restrictions and barriers against which his early zeal had tilted.  Certainly in the ideal state the rights and obligations of the different classes would be more evenly adjusted.  But the ideal state was a figment of the brain.  The real one, as Crescenti had long ago pointed out, was the gradual and heterogeneous product of remote social conditions, wherein every seeming inconsistency had its roots in some bygone need, and the character of each class, with its special passions, ignorances and prejudices, was the sum total of influences so ingrown and inveterate that they had become a law of thought.  All this, however, seemed rather matter for philosophic musing than for definite action.  His predominant feeling was still that of remoteness from the immediate issues of life:  the soeva indignatio had been succeeded by a great calm.

The soothing influences of the monastic life had doubtless helped to tide him over the stormy passage of returning consciousness.  His sensitiveness to these influences inclined him for the first time to consider them 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.