Ch. 4 - The Church - Page 2

which both in their Gospel and their Church had
been once simple. Day by day they put forth fresh treatises, aroused
fierce controversies, subsided into new sects; and day by day they
altered more and more the once noble aspect of the ancient basilica.
They hung their nauseous relics on its mighty walls, they stuck their
tiny tapers about its glorious pillars, they wreathed their tawdry
fringes around its massive altars. Here they polished, there they
embroidered. Wherever there was a window, they curtained it with gaudy
cloths; wherever there was a statue, they bedizened it with artificial
flowers; wherever there was a solemn recess, they outraged its religious
gloom with intruding light; until (arriving at the period we write of)
they succeeded so completely in changing the aspect of the building,
that it looked, within, more like a vast pagan toyshop than a Christian
church. Here and there, it is true, a pillar or an altar rose
unencumbered as of old, appearing as much at variance with the frippery
that surrounded it as a text of Scripture quoted in a sermon of the
time. But as regarded the general aspect of the basilica, the decent
glories of its earlier days seemed irrevocably departed and destroyed.

After what has been said of the edifice, the reader will have little
difficulty in imagining that the square in which it stood lost whatever
elevation of character it might once have possessed, with even greater
rapidity than the church itself. If the cathedral now looked like an
immense toyshop, assuredly its attendant colonnades had the appearance
of the booths of an enormous fair.

The day, whose decline we have hinted at in the preceding chapter, was
fast verging towards its close, as the inhabitants of the streets on the
western bank of the Tiber prepared to join the crowds that they beheld
passing by their windows in the direction of the Basilica of St. Peter.
The cause of this sudden confluence of the popular current in once
common direction was made sufficiently apparent to all inquirers who
happened to be near a church or a public building, by the appearance in
such situations of a large sheet of vellum elaborately illuminated,
raised on a high pole, and guarded from contact with the inquisitive
rabble by two armed soldiers. The announcements set forth in these
strange placards were all of the same nature and directed to the same
end. In each of them the Bishop of Rome informed his 'pious and
honourable brethren', the inhabitants of the city, that, as the next
days was the anniversary of the Martyrdom of St. Luke, the vigil would
necessarily be held on that evening in the Basilica of St. Peter; and
that, in consideration of the importance of the occasion, there would be
exhibited, before the