This imperial form of Theocracy exercised for him, both imaginatively and historically, an enormous attraction. Its special appeal to the Latin and Celtic races; its unbroken phalanx of organisation; its immemorial persistence of policy; its creative combination of spirituality with art, of purity with beauty; its union of ideals beyond and above the world with the mechanism of empires; its blend of contrasts, of solemn softness with sombre control, of charm with coldness, of callousness with charity, of loneliness with society, of curse and comfort; its theoretic espousal of theological free will with the practical denial of it in action, and of outward pomp with inward simplicity; its watchful intimacies with every moment of life--the way in which, as he puts it in _Contarini_, it “... produces in” its “dazzling processions and sacred festivals an effect upon the business of the day;” its guardianship of the weak, the erring, and the poor; its nursing motherhood of doubt and despair; its insidious captivation of the will and intellect; its power to recall and continue the spirits of the centuries, to absorb schism and rebaptise it union; its claims to obliterate the past for the penitent; to keep all things old and make all things new; its great deeds and its great heroes; these elements and many more, that have cooped Jews in Ghettos while blazoning the proud inscription in front of St. Peter’s, _Vicit Leo de tribu Juda_,--all these opposites enchant even when they fail to enchain the mind and the feelings. They have linked the Vatican and the Palatine, the see to the throne, the tiara to the diadem. They have transfigured, while maintaining, pagan rites and customs, till “Madre Natura” reappears with a halo, the very shrines of the Madonna repeat the antique pattern of those dedicated to the Lares and Penates, and the procession of waxen images in Southern Italy but perpetuates another and an older ceremony. The Roman Church has been the most consistent educator, the greatest organiser, the most universal legislator of the last thousand years. It has attained uncompromising ends unswervingly pursued by compromises the most subtle and the most skilful. Nor is the esoteric doctrine which recalls the Eleusinian Mysteries, and enables the initiated to regard forms comprehensible by the multitude as merely popular symbols of higher truths, without a certain glamour of its own. Disraeli’s father had penned a treatise on the Jesuits, and their history had been deeply studied by the son. I can still recall the unconscious tone of ironical appreciation with which one of those “professors,” “capable of effecting a great influence on the youth of England,” informed me that when he met Disraeli, “he spoke to me of the Jesuits.” Both the two factors in himself which I have mentioned, the sense of mystery and the impulse to control, are precisely the atmosphere of the Papal Church. There was, therefore, to some extent the attraction of affinity.