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.  I am not of those who believe that God permits good to come to mankind through one channel only, and I doubt not that now and in times past the thinkers whom your Highness follows have done much to raise the condition of their fellows; but I would have you observe that, where they have done so, it has been because, at bottom, their aims coincided with the Church’s.  The deeper you probe into her secret sources of power, the more you find there, in the germ if you will, but still potentially active, all those humanising energies which work together for the lifting of the race.  In her wisdom and her patience she may have seen fit to withhold their expression, to let them seek another outlet; but they are there, stored in her consciousness like the archetypes of the Platonists in the Universal Mind.  It is the knowledge of this, the sure knowledge of it, which creates the atmosphere of serenity that you feel about you.  From the tilling of the vineyards, or the dressing of a beggar’s sores, to the loftiest and most complicated intellectual labour imposed on him, each brother knows that his daily task is part of a great scheme of action, working ever from imperfection to perfection, from human incompleteness to the divine completion.  This sense of being, not straws on a blind wind of chance, but units in an ordered force, gives to the humblest Christian an individual security and dignity which kings on their thrones might envy.