Ch. 4 - The Church

In the year 324, on the locality assigned by rumour to the martyrdom of
St. Peter, and over the ruins of the Circus of Nero, Constantine erected
the church called the Basilica of St. Peter.

For twelve centuries, this building, raised by a man infamous for his
murders and his tyrannies, stood uninjured amid the shocks which during
that long period devastated the rest of the city. After that time it was
removed, tottering to its base from its own reverend and illustrious
age, by Pope Julius II, to make way for the foundations of the modern
church.

It is towards this structure of twelve hundred years' duration, erected
by hands stained with blood, and yet preserved as a star of peace in the
midst of stormy centuries of war, that we would direct the reader's
attention. What art has done for the modern church, time has effected
for the ancient. If the one is majestic to the eye by its grandeur, the
other is hallowed to the memory by its age.

As this church by its rise commemorated the triumphant establishment of
Christianity as the religion of Rome, so in its progress it reflected
every change wrought in the spirit of the new worship by the ambition,
the prodigality, or the frivolity of the priests. At first it stood
awful and imposing, beautiful in all its parts as the religion for whose
glory it was built. Vast porphyry colonnades decorated its approaches,
and surrounded a fountain whose waters issued from the representation of
a gigantic pine-tree in bronze. Its double rows of aisles were each
supported by forty-eight columns of precious marble. Its flat ceiling
was adorned with beams of gilt metal, rescued from the pollution of
heathen temples. Its walls were decorated with large paintings of
religious subjects, and its tribunal was studded with elegant mosaics.
Thus it rose, simple and yet sublime, awful and yet alluring; in this
its beginning, a type of the dawn of the worship which it was elevated
to represent. But when, flushed with success, the priests seized on
Christianity as their path to politics and their introduction to power,
the aspect of the church gradually began to change. As, slowly and
insensibly, ambitious man heaped the garbage of his mysteries, his
doctrines, and his disputes, about the pristine purity of the structure
given him by God, so, one by one, gaudy adornments and meretricious
alterations arose to sully the once majestic basilica, until the
threatening and reproving apparition of the pagan Julian, when both
Church and churchmen received in their corrupt progress a sudden and
impressive check.

The short period of the revival of idolatry once passed over, the
priests, unmoved by the warning they had received, returned with renewed
vigour to confuse that