Page:On papal conclaves (IA a549801700cartuoft).djvu/100

 should be confronted with the spirit of martyrdom. In this state of affairs it was natural that measures should have been revolved to render possible the unbroken action of the Church as a hidden institution in that season of persecution which then seemed to threaten her public existence with extinction. To this end it was considered primarily essential that those provisions should be modified, the observance of which, as enjoined by the statutes of the Church as they then stood, would unavoidably surround the election of a Pope with formalities that must increase the difficulty of effecting it in the teeth of an overwhelming conqueror who did not recoil from the use of physical force to extort moral concessions. In the month of February, therefore—the very time when the French troops were pressing on rapidly, and no one in Rome could say at what point their chief would arrest his triumphant advance,—the draft of a Brief was indited, suspending, for the sole occasion of the next election, the provision which, for the benefit of Cardinals at a distance, imposes an obligatory delay of nine days after the Pope's decease before a ballot can be taken in Conclave. There can be no ambiguity as