Here on a small scale, in the very neighbourhood of man’s busiest haunts, occur the cosmical cataclysms which are usually seen only in remote solitudes, and which during the unknown ages of geology have left their indelible records on large portions of the earth’s surface.  Here we are admitted into the very workshop of Nature, and are privileged to witness her processes of creation.  In the neighbourhood of Rome the volcanoes are long extinct.  Nature is dead, and there is nothing left but her cold gray ashes.  But here we see her in all her vigour, changing and renewing and mingling the ruins of her works in strange association with those of man—­the ashes of her volcanoes with the fragments of temples and baths and the houses of Roman senators and poets.  The whole region lies over a burning mystery, and one has a constant feeling of insecurity lest the ground should open suddenly and precipitate one into the very heart of it.  Naples itself, strange to say, a city of more than five hundred thousand inhabitants, is built in great part within an old broken-down volcanic crater, and the proximity of its awful neighbour shows that it stands perilously on the brink of destruction, and may share at any time the fate of Pompeii and Herculaneum.  Were it not for the safety-valves of Vesuvius and Solfatara, the whole intermediate region, with its towns and villages and swarming population, would be blown into the air by the vehement forces that are struggling beneath.  It was this elemental war—­fiercer, we have reason to believe, in classic times than now—­that gave rise to the religious fables of the poets.  The gloomy shades of Avernus, the tremendous battles of the gods, the dark pictures of Tartarus and the Stygian river, were the supernatural suggestions of a fiery soil.  To the fierce throes of volcanic action we owe the weird mythology of the ancients, which has imparted such a profound charm to the region, and also, strange as it may seem, the surpassing loveliness of Nature herself.  The fairest regions of the earth are ever those where the awful power of fire has been at work, giving to the landscape that passionate expression which lights up a human face with its most impressive beauty.

The visit of the apostle to Puteoli served many important purposes.  He who had sent his people Israel into Egypt and Babylon that they might be benefited by coming into contact with other civilisations, sent St. Paul to this famous region where Greece and Rome—­which, geographically and historically, were turned back to back, the face of Greece looking eastward, the face of Italy looking westward—­seemed to meet and to blend into each other, in order that his sympathies might be expanded by coming into contact with all that man could realise of earthly glory or conceive of religion.  We can trace the overruling Hand that was shaping the destinies of the Church in the course which he was led to take from Jerusalem to Damascus, and thence to Asia Minor, Corinth, Athens,