In contrast with these two, who shape their course by the light of
their own souls, the authorised exponents of morality play a secondary
and for the most part a sorry part. The old Pope mournfully reflects
that his seven years' tillage of the garden of the Church has issued
only in the "timid leaf and the uncertain bud," while the perfect
flower, Pompilia, has sprung up by the wayside 'neath the foot of the
enemy, "a mere chance-sown seed."

"Where are the Christians in their panoply?
The loins we girt about with truth, the breasts
Righteousness plated round, the shield of faith?...
Slunk into corners!"

The Aretine Archbishop, who thrust the suppliant Pompilia back upon the
wolf, the Convent of Convertities, who took her in as a suffering saint,
and after her death claimed her succession because she was of dishonest
life, the unspeakable Abate and Canon, Guido's brothers,--it is these
figures who have played the most sinister part, and the old Pope
contemplates them with the "terror" of one who sees his fundamental
assumptions shaken at the root. For here the theory of the Church was
hard to maintain. Not only had the Church, whose mission it was to guide
corrupt human nature by its divine light, only darkened and destroyed,
but the saving love and faith had sprung forth at the bidding of natural
promptings of the spirit, which its rule and law were to supersede.[55]
The blaze of "uncommissioned meteors" had intervened where the
authorised luminaries failed, and if they dazzled, it was with excess of
light. Was Caponsacchi blind?

"Ay, as a man should be inside the sun,