ortions! 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 false
principles which entered into 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 the
sale of indulgences for sin 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 entab