of the dawn of the worship
which it was elevated to represent. But when, flushed with success,
the priests seized on Christianity as their path to politics and their
introduction to power, the aspect of the church gradually began to
change. As, slowly and insensibly, ambitious man heaped the garbage of
his mysteries, his doctrines, and his disputes, about the pristine
purity of the structure given him by God, so, one by one, gaudy
adornments and meretricious alterations arose to sully the once
majestic basilica, until the threatening and reproving apparition of
the pagan Julian, when both Church and churchmen received in their
corrupt progress a sudden and impressive check.

The short period of the revival of idolatry once passed over, the
priests, unmoved by the warning they had received, returned with
renewed vigour to confuse that which both in their Gospel and their
Church had been once simple. Day by day they put forth fresh
treatises, aroused fierce controversies, subsided into new sects; and
day by day they altered more and more the once noble aspect of the
ancient basilica. They hung their nauseous relics on its mighty walls,
they stuck their tiny tapers about its glorious pillars, they wreathed
their tawdry fringes around its massive altars. Here they polished,
there they embroidered. Wherever there was a window, they curtained it
with gaudy cloths; wherever there was a statue, they bedizened it with
artificial flowers; wherever there was a solemn recess, they outraged
its religious gloom with intruding light; until (arriving at the period
we write of) they succeeded so completely in changing the aspect of the
building, that it looked, within, more like a vast pagan toyshop than a
Christian church. Here and there, it is true, a pillar or an altar
rose unencumbered as of old, appearing as much at variance with the
frippery that surrounded it as a text of Scripture quoted in a sermon
of the time. But as regarded the general aspect of the basilica, the
decent glories of its earlier days seemed irrevocably departed and
destroyed.

After what has been said of the edifice, the reader will have little
difficulty in imagining that the square in which it stood lost whatever
elevation of character it might once have possessed, with even greater
rapidity than the church itself. If the cathedral now looked like an
immense toyshop, assuredly its attendant colonnades had the appearance
of the booths of an enormous f