y the doors were no longer thrown wide open; on the rare
occasions when the Pope yet came down to officiate, to show himself as
the supreme representative of the Divinity on earth, the basilica was
filled with chosen ones. To enter it you needed a card of invitation. You
no longer saw the people--a throng of fifty, even eighty, thousand
Christians--flocking to the Church and swarming within it promiscuously;
there was but a select gathering, a congregation of friends convened as
for a private function. Even when, by dint of effort, thousands were
collected together there, they formed but a picked audience invited to
the performance of a monster concert.

* The chair and stage are known by that name.--Trans.

And as Pierre strolled among the bright, crude marbles in that cold if
gorgeous museum, the feeling grew upon him that he was in some pagan
temple raised to the deity of Light and Pomp. The larger temples of
ancient Rome were certainly similar piles, upheld by the same precious
columns, with walls covered with the same polychromatic marbles and
vaulted ceilings having the same gilded panels. And his feeling was
destined to become yet more acute after his visits to the other
basilicas, which could but reveal the truth to him. First one found the
Christian Church quietly, audaciously quartering itself in a pagan
church, as, for instance, San Lorenzo in Miranda installed in the temple
of Antoninus and Faustina, and retaining the latter's rare porticus in
_cipollino_ marble and its handsome white marble entablature. Then there
was the Christian Church springing from the ruins of the destroyed pagan
edifice, as, for example, San Clemente, beneath which centuries of
contrary beliefs are stratified: a very ancient edifice of the time of
the kings or the republic, then another of the days of the empire
identified as a temple of Mithras, and next a basilica of the primitive
faith. Then, too, there was the Christian Church, typified by that of
Saint Agnes-beyond-the-walls which had been built on exactly the same
pattern as the Roman secular basilica--that Tribunal and Exchange which
accompanied every Forum. And, in particular, there was the Christian
Church erected with material stolen from the demolished pagan temples. To
this testified the sixteen superb columns of that same Saint Agnes,
columns of various marbles filched from various gods; the one and twenty
columns of Santa Maria in Trastevere, columns of all sorts of o