re, the
fraternal and simple ones of the primitive Church, one may well ask
whether Rome has ever been Christian at all!

And whilst Pierre was for the second time walking round the huge
basilica, admiring the tombs of the popes, truth, like a sudden
illumination, burst upon him and filled him with its glow. Ah! those
tombs! Yonder in the full sunlight, in the rosy Campagna, on either side
of the Appian Way--that triumphal approach to Rome, conducting the
stranger to the august Palatine with its crown of circling palaces--there
arose the gigantic tombs of the powerful and wealthy, tombs of
unparalleled artistic splendour, perpetuating in marble the pride and
pomp of a strong race that had mastered the world. Then, near at hand,
beneath the sod, in the shrouding night of wretched mole-holes, other
tombs were hidden--the tombs of the lowly, the poor, and the
suffering--tombs destitute of art or display, but whose very humility
proclaimed that a breath of affection and resignation had passed by, that
One had come preaching love and fraternity, the relinquishment of the
wealth of the earth for the everlasting joys of a future life, and
committing to the soil the good seed of His Gospel, sowing the new
humanity which was to transform the olden world. And, behold, from that
seed, buried in the soil for centuries, behold, from those humble,
unobtrusive tombs, where martyrs slept their last and gentle sleep whilst
waiting for the glorious call, yet other tombs had sprung, tombs as
gigantic and as pompous as the ancient, destroyed sepulchres of the
idolaters, tombs uprearing their marbles among a pagan-temple-like
splendour, proclaiming the same superhuman pride, the same mad passion
for universal sovereignty. At the time of the Renascence Rome became
pagan once more; the old imperial blood frothed up and swept Christianity
away with the greatest onslaught ever directed against it. Ah! those
tombs of the popes at St. Peter's, with their impudent, insolent
glorification of the departed, their sumptuous, carnal hugeness, defying
death and setting immortality upon this earth. There are giant popes of
bronze, allegorical figures and angels of equivocal character wearing the
beauty of lovely girls, of passion-compelling women with the thighs and
the breasts of pagan goddesses! Paul III is seated on a high pedestal,
Justice and Prudence are almost prostrate at his feet. Urban VIII is
between Prudence and Religion, Innocent XI between