“Kenneth!” I cried, “Kenneth! Is he dead?”
“Hush, old boy. Take it easy. Rest awhile.”
His silence was sufficient.
“My God! I am punished!” I gasped out, and fainted again.
TO BE CONCLUDED NEXT MONTH.
THE CARDINALATE.
I.
The Senate and Sovereign Council of the Pope in the government and administration of the affairs of the church in Rome and throughout the world is composed of a number of very distinguished ecclesiastics who are called Cardinals. The office and dignity of a member of this body is termed the Cardinalate.
There is some dispute among the learned about the precise origin and meaning of the word cardinal as applied to such a person; but the commoner opinion derives it from the Latin cardo, the hinge of a door, which is probably correct; but the reason assigned for the appellation—because the Cardinals are, in a figurative sense, the pivots around which revolve the portals of Christian Rome—is more descriptive than accurate. At a comparatively early age the parish priests of the churches, and later the canons of the cathedrals of Milan, Ravenna, Naples, and other cities of Italy, also in parts of France, Spain, and other countries, were called cardinals; and Muratori suggests that the name was taken in imitation, and perhaps in emulation, of the chief clergymen of the church in Rome. He thinks that they were so called at Rome and elsewhere because put in possession of, or immovably attached—incardinati—to certain churches, which was expressed in low Latin by the verb cardinare or incardinare, formed, indeed, from cardo as above, and the application of which in this sense receives an illustration from Vitruvius, who writes, in his treatise on architecture, of tignum cardinatum—one beam fitted into another.