‘There are, I conceive, two strains of description, by no means obviously identical, yet both alike true, which may be applied to the Papal action as a whole. The Pope, it may be said, adopted in effect no new decision; he only made articulate what the whole previous history and circumstances implied; he only formally expressed as conclusion, what was unmistakably contained, on their most natural interpretation, within the premises. This is true. But that it should be true is the heart of the pathos. It is the very admirableness of the protagonist, it is the moral excellence of his purposes coupled with what seems the inexorableness of a perverse setting of pre-assumptions or pre-conditions, which is the familiar secret of living tragedy. For on the other hand, it would be no less true to pronounce of the Papal action as a whole, that, basing itself upon the lines of a warped continuity of tradition and theory, it re-affirmed every disproportion of the older conception, reemphasized every externalizing and materializing tendency, . . . At a moment singularly rich with possibilities for the future, it made after all no new effort; it saw no glimpse of newly harmonizing or interpretative insight; it simply sank back—as it were exhausted and defeated—within the rigidities which had suited, which perhaps had sufficed for, a cruder and rigider age.’