; but it also
avoids the defects of its avowed model, by securing the entrance of
abundant light, and dilating the imagination with the sense of space to
soar and float in. It is the dome that makes S. Peter's what it is--the
adequate symbol of the Church in an age that had abandoned mediaevalism and
produced a new type of civility for the modern nations. On the connection
between the building of S. Peter's and the Reformation I have touched
already.[45] This mighty temple is the shrine of Catholicity, no longer
cosmopolitan by right of spiritual empire, but secularised and limited to
Latin races. At the same time it represents the spirit of a period when
the Popes still led the world as intellectual chiefs. As the decree for
its erection was the last act of the Papacy before the schism of the North
had driven it into blind conflict with advancing culture, so S. Peter's
remains the monument to after ages of a moment when the Roman Church,
unterrified as yet by German rebels, dared to share the mundane impulse of
the classical revival. She had forgotten the catacombs and ruthlessly
destroyed the Basilica of Constantine. By rebuilding the mother church of
Western Christianity upon a new plan, she broke with tradition; and if
Rome has not ceased to be the Eternal City, if all ways are still leading
to Rome, we may even hazard a conjecture that in the last days of their
universal monarchy the Popes reared this fane to be the temple of a spirit
alien to their own. It is at any rate certain that S. Peter's produces an
impression less ecclesiastical, and less strictly Christian, than almost
any of the elder and far humbler churches of Europe. Raised by proud and
secular pontiffs in the heyday of renascent humanism, it seems to wait the
time when the high priests of a religion no longer hostile to science or
antagonistic to the inevitable force of progress will chaunt their hymns
beneath its spacious dome.

The building of S. Peter's was so momentous in modern history, and so
decisive for Italian architecture, that it may be permitted me to describe
the vicissitudes through which the structure passed before reaching
completion. Nicholas V., founder of the secular papacy and chief patron of
the humanistic movement in Rome, had approved a scheme for thoroughly
rebuilding and refortifying the pontifical city.[46] Part of this plan
involved the reconstruction of S. Peter's. The old basilica was to be
removed, and on its site was to