Kings may perish, but God lives! And, moreover, there is nothing anti-Christian in the republican form of government; indeed, on the contrary, it would seem like an awakening of that Christian commonwealth to which you have referred in some really charming pages.
The worst is that liberty at once becomes license, and that our desire for conciliation is often very badly requited....

But ah! what a wicked book you have written, my son,--with the best intentions, I am willing to believe,--and how your silence shows that you are beginning to recognise the disastrous consequences of your error." Pierre still remained silent, overcome, feeling as if his arguments would fall against some deaf, blind, and impenetrable rock, which it was useless to assail since nothing could enter it.

And only one thing now preoccupied him; he wondered how it was that a man of such intelligence and such ambition had not formed a more distinct and exact idea of the modern world.

He could divine that the Pope possessed much information and carried the map of Christendom with many of the needs, deeds, and hopes of the nations, in his mind amidst his complicated diplomatic enterprises; but at the same time what gaps there were in his knowledge! The truth, no doubt, was that his personal acquaintance with the world was confined to his brief nunciature at Brussels.* * That too, was in 1843-44, and the world is now utterly unlike what it was then!--Trans.
During his occupation of the see of Perugia, which had followed, he had only mingled with the dawning life of young Italy.

And for eighteen years now he had been shut up in the Vatican, isolated from the rest of mankind and communicating with the nations solely through his _entourage_, which was often most unintelligent, most mendacious, and most treacherous.
Moreover, he was an Italian priest, a superstitious and despotic High Pontiff, bound by tradition, subjected to the influences of race environment, pecuniary considerations, and political necessities, not to speak of his great pride, the conviction that he ought to be implicitly obeyed in all things as the one sole legitimate power upon earth.