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, Delirious with the plenitude of light."[56] [Footnote 55: _The Pope_, 1550 f.] [Footnote 56: _The Pope_, 1563.] It is easy to imagine how so grave an indictment would have been forced home by the author of the _Cenci_ had this other, less famous, "Roman murder-case" fallen into his hands. The old Godwinian virus would have found ready material in this disastrous breakdown of a great institution, this magnificent uprising of emancipated souls. Yet, though the Shelleyan affinities of Browning are here visible enough, his point of view is clearly distinct. The revolutionary animus against institutions as the sole obstacle to the native goodness of man has wholly vanished; but of historic or mystic reverence for them he has not a trace. He parts company with Rousseau without showing the smallest affinity to Burke. As sources of moral and spiritual growth the State and the Church do not count. Training and discipline have their relative worth, but the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the heights of moral achievement are won by those alone in whom it breathes the heroism of aspiration and resolve. His idealists grow for the most part in the interstices of the social organism. He recognises them, it is true, without difficulty even in the most central and responsible organs of government. None of his unofficial heroes--Paracelsus or Sordello or Rabbi ben Ezra--has a deeper moral insight than the aged Pope. But the Pope's impressiveness for Browning and for his readers lies just in his complete emancipation from the bias of his office. He faces the task of judgment, not as an infallible priest, but as a man, whose wisdom, like other men's, depends upon the measure of his God-given judgment, and flags with years. His "grey ultimate decrepitude" is fallible, Pope though he be; and he naïvely submits the verdict it has framed to the judgment of his former self, the vigorous, but yet uncrowned, worker in the world.