magnitude after the eye gets accustomed to the vast proportions!  Oh, what silence reigns around!  How difficult, even for the sonorous chants of choristers and priests to disturb that silence,—­to be more than echoes of a distant music which seems to come from the very courts of heaven itself:  to some a holy sanctuary, where one may meditate among crowds and feel alone; where one breathes an atmosphere which changes not with heat or cold; and where the ever-burning lamps and clouds of incense diffusing the fragrance of the East, and the rich dresses of the mitred priests, and the unnumbered symbols, suggest the ritualism of that imposing worship when Solomon dedicated to Jehovah the grandest temple of antiquity!

Truly was St. Peter’s Church the last great achievement of the popes, the crowning demonstration of their temporal dominion; suggestive of their wealth and power, a marble history of pride and pomp, a fitting emblem of that worship which appeals to sense rather than to God.  And singular it was, when the great artist reared that gigantic pile, even though it symbolized the cross, he really gave a vital wound to that cause to which he consecrated his noblest energies; for its lofty dome could not be completed without the contributions of Christendom, and those contributions could not be made without an appeal to perversions which grew out of Mediaeval Catholicism,—­even penance and self-expiation, which stirred the holy indignation of a man who knew and declared on what different ground justification should be based.  Thus was Luther, in one sense, called into action by the labors of Michael Angelo; thus was the erection of St. Peter’s Church overruled in the preaching of reformers, who would show that the money obtained by misinterpreted “indulgences” could never purchase an acceptable offering to God, even though the monument were filled with Christian emblems, and consecrated by those prayers and anthems which had been the life of blessed saints and martyrs for more than a thousand years.

St. Peter’s is not Gothic, it is a restoration of the Greek; it belongs to what artists call the Renaissance,—­a style of architecture marked by a return to the classical models of antiquity.  Michael Angelo brought back to civilization the old ideas of Grecian grace and Roman majesty,—­typical of the original inspirations of the men who lived in the quiet admiration of eternal beauty and grace; the men who built the Parthenon, and who shaped pillars and capitals and entablatures in the severest proportions, and fitted them with ornaments drawn from the living world,—­plants and animals, especially images of God’s highest work, even of man; and of man not worn and macerated and dismal and monstrous, but of man when most resplendent in the perfections of the primeval strength and beauty.  He returned to a style which classical antiquity carried to great perfection, but which had been neglected by the new Teutonic nations.