Of all the things I have seen the most convincing, and as it were crushing, were these red columns of Constantine.  In explanation of the sentiment there are a thousand things that want saying and cannot be said.  Never have I felt so vividly the great fact of our history; that the Christian religion is like a huge bridge across a boundless sea, which alone connects us with the men who made the world, and yet have utterly vanished from the world.  To put it curtly and very crudely on this point alone it was possible to sympathise with a Roman and not merely to admire him.  All his pagan remains are but sublime fossils; for we can never know the life that was in them.  We know that here and there was a temple to Venus or there an altar to Vesta; but who knows or pretends to know what he really felt about Venus or Vesta?  Was a Vestal Virgin like a Christian Virgin, or something profoundly different?  Was he quite serious about Venus, like a diabolist, or merely frivolous about Venus, like a Christian?  If the spirit was different from ours we cannot hope to understand it, and if the spirit was like ours, the spirit was expressed in images that no longer express it.  But it is here that he and I meet; and salute the same images in the end.

In any case I can never recapture in words the waves of sympathy with strange things that went through me in that twilight of the tall pillars, like giants robed in purple, standing still and looking down into that dark hole in the ground.  Here halted that imperial civilisation, when it had marched in triumph through the whole world; here in the evening of its days it came trailing in all its panoply in the pathway of the three kings.  For it came following not only a falling but a fallen star and one that dived before them into a birthplace darker than a grave.  And the lord of the laurels, clad in his sombre crimson, looked down into that darkness, and then looked up, and saw that all the stars in his own sky were dead.  They were deities no longer but only a brilliant dust, scattered down the vain void of Lucretius.  The stars were as stale as they were strong; they would never die for they had never lived; they were cursed with an incurable immortality that was but the extension of mortality; they were chained in the chains of causation and unchangeable as the dead.  There are not many men in the modern world who do not know that mood, though it was not discovered by the moderns; it was the final and seemingly fixed mood of nearly all the ancients.  Only above the black hole of Bethlehem they had seen a star wandering like a lost spark; and it had done what the eternal suns and planets could not do.  It had disappeared.