That was considered an additional indecorum. His quaintly correct
and archaic diction exasperated men who had no means of expressing
their thoughts except in the fluid allusive clipped verbosity of the
day. Objections were made to His hendecasyllabical allocutions,
by mediocrities who could not away with a man who discoursed in
ithyphallics. His autocratic dogmatism, which really was due to His
entire occession by His office, shocked the opportunist, irritated
the worldly-prudent. Outside in the world too, He was by no means a
complete success. People, who were not of His Communion, thought it
rather a liberty that a Pope should have the Authorized Version at His
fingers' ends. At first, a lot of fantastic instabilities prepared
to hail Him as a Reformer: but He gave dire offence to them, and to
all pious fat-wits, by flatly refusing His countenance to any kind of
Scheme or Society. "The Church suffices for this life," He said; and
His sentence "Cultivate, and help to cultivate individuality, at your
own expense if possible, but never at the expense of your brother,"
was highly disapproved of. Where did the Rights of Man come in? But
then Hadrian was quite certain that Christians actually had no worldly
"rights" at all. Arraigned on the question of superstition by the
stolidly common-sense Talacryn, He said "Extra-belief, superstition,
that which we hope or augur or imagine, is the poetry of life;" and His
utterance was regarded as almost heretical. His utter lack of personal
swagger or even dignity, His habit of rolling and smoking continual
cigarettes, His natural and patently unprofessional manner, offended
many outsiders who only could think of the Pope as partaking of the
dual character of an Immeasurably Ambitious Clergyman and a Scarlet
Impossible Person. He had enemies at home and abroad. And He remained
quite alone, psychically detached: to a very great extent unconscious
of, certainly uninterested in, the impression which He personally was
creating; and altogether uninfluenced by any other mind or any other
creature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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