urs of the vegetation
are in harmony with those of the falling ruins, and how perfectly the
whole landscape is in tone! The remains of the palace of the Caesars and
of the golden halls of Nero appear in the distance, their gray and
tottering turrets and their moss-stained arches reposing, as it were,
upon the decaying vegetation: and there is nothing that marks the
existence of life except the few pious devotees, who wander from station
to station in the arena below, kneeling before the cross, and
demonstrating the triumph of a religion, which received in this very spot
in the early period of its existence one of its most severe persecutions,
and which, nevertheless, has preserved what remains of that building,
where attempts were made to stifle it almost at its birth; for, without
the influence of Christianity, these majestic ruins would have been
dispersed or levelled to the dust. Plundered of their lead and iron by
the barbarians, Goths, and Vandals, and robbed even of their stones by
Roman princes, the Barberini, they owe what remains of their relics to
the sanctifying influence of that faith which has preserved for the world
all that was worth preserving, not merely arts and literature but
likewise that which constitutes the progressive nature of intellect and
the institutions which afford to us happiness in this world and hopes of
a blessed immortality in the next. And, being of the faith of Rome, I
may say, that the preservation of this pile by the sanctifying effect of
a few crosses planted round it, is almost a miraculous event. And what a
contrast the present application of this building, connected with holy
feelings and exalted hopes, is to that of the ancient one, when it was
used for exhibiting to the Roman people the destruction of men by wild
beasts, or of men, more savage than wild beasts, by each other, to
gratify a horrible appetite for cruelty, founded upon a still more
detestable lust, that of universal domination! And who would have
supposed, in the time of Titus, that a faith, despised in its
insignificant origin, and persecuted from the supposed obscurity of its
founder and its principles, should have reared a dome to the memory of
one of its humblest teachers, more glorious than was ever framed for
Jupiter or Apollo in the ancient world, and have preserved even the ruins
of the temples of the pagan deities, and have burst forth in splendour
and majesty, consecrating truth amidst the shrines of