And my horror, my disillusionment increased at every word he said.
I learnt from him that Pope Paul III was no exception to the rule, no such
scandal as I had imagined; that his own elevation to the purple was due in
origin to the favour which his sister, the beautiful Giulia, had found in
the eyes of the Borgia Pope, some fifty years ago. Through him I came to
know the Sacred College as it really was; not the very home and fount of
Christianity, as I had deemed it, controlled and guided by men of a sublime
saintliness of ways, but a gathering of ambitious worldlings, who had
become so brazen in their greed of temporal power that they did not even
trouble to cloak the sin and evil in which they lived; men in whom the
spirit that had actuated those saints the study of whose lives had been my
early delight, lived no more than it might live in the bosom of a harlot.
I said so to him one day in a wild, furious access of boldness, in one of
those passionate outbursts that are begotten of illusions blighted.
He heard me through quite calmly, without the least trace of anger, smiling
ever his quiet mocking smile, and plucking at his little, auburn beard.
"You are wrong, I think," he said. "Say that the Church has fallen a prey
to self-seekers who have entered it under the cloak of the priesthood.
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