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It is so nominated
in the bond!"
At the end of October Montanelli returned to
his see in the Romagna, and, before leaving Florence,
preached a farewell sermon in which he spoke
of the controversy, gently deprecating the vehemence
of both writers and begging his unknown
defender to set an example of tolerance by closing
a useless and unseemly war of words. On the
following day the Churchman contained a notice
that, at Monsignor Montanelli's publicly expressed
desire, "A Son of the Church" would withdraw
from the controversy.
The last word remained with the Gadfly. He
issued a little leaflet, in which he declared himself
disarmed and converted by Montanelli's Christian
meekness and ready to weep tears of reconciliation
upon the neck of the first Sanfedist he met. "I
am even willing," he concluded; "to embrace my
anonymous challenger himself; and if my readers
knew, as his Eminence and I know, what that
implies and why he remains anonymous, they
would believe in the sincerity of my conversion.


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