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"All you good people are so full of the most
delightful hopes and expectations; you are always
ready to think that if one well-meaning middle-aged
gentleman happens to get elected Pope,
everything else will come right of itself. He has
only got to throw open the prison doors and give
his blessing to everybody all round, and we may
expect the millennium within three months. You
never seem able to see that he can't set things
right even if he would. It's the principle of the
thing that's wrong, not the behaviour of this man
or that."
"What principle? The temporal power of the
Pope?"
"Why that in particular? That's merely a part
of the general wrong. The bad principle is that
any man should hold over another the power to
bind and loose. It's a false relationship to stand
in towards one's fellows."
Martini held up his hands. "That will do, Madonna,"
he said, laughing. "I am not going to
discuss with you, once you begin talking rank
Antinomianism in that fashion. I'm sure your
ancestors must have been English Levellers in the
seventeenth century.


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