chair the dying words of our Lord, "With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer." One wonders if his text came back to him, if he asked himself in his heart why his lips should have uttered those fateful words unawares, and if the bitterness of that withdrawal, while still full of force and life, from all the hopes and projects to which he had set his hand, was heavy upon him? He had proclaimed them in the hush and breathless silence of that splendid crowd in the ruddy days of the late autumn, St. Martin's festival at Rome: and the year had not gone its round when, in the summer weather at Perugia, he "suffered"--as he had--yet had not, perhaps foreseen. Thus ended a life of great effort and power, a life of disappointment and failure, full of toil, full of ambition, the highest aims, and the most consistent purpose--but ending in nothing, fulfilling no lofty aim, and, except in the horrible episode of bloodshed and destruction from which his name can never be dissociated, accomplishing no change in the world which he had attempted, in every quarter, to transform or to renew. Never was so much attempted with so little result. He claimed the power to bind and loose, to set up and to pull down, to decide every disputed cause and settle every controversy. But he succeeded in doing only one good deed, which was to force the king of France to retain an unloved wife, and one ill one, to print the name of Holy Church in blood across a ruined province, to the profit of many bloody partisans, but never to his own, nor to any cause which could be considered that of justice or truth. This, people say, was the age of history in which the power of the Church was highest, and Innocent was its strongest ruler; but this was all which, with his great powers, his unyielding character and all the forces at his command, he was able to achieve. He was in his way a great man, and his purpose was never ignoble; but this was all: and history does not contain a sadder page than that which records one of the greatest of all the pontificates, and the strongest Pope that history has known.