Constantine’s Basilica rose in strength and beauty, and was consecrated in 326, thirteen years after that 13th of June, 313, when he had seen the vision. Although only half the size of the present Church, it was, until this was built, one of the three largest in Europe, the other two being those of Milan and Seville; strangely enough, the three were all of equal dimensions—three hundred and ninety-five feet long by two hundred and twelve in width. Eighty-six marble pillars divided the nave of St. Peter’s from the aisles and supported the roof; and, like all the basilicas, it had a rich portico running all along its front, also decorated with columns. The interior was gorgeous with gold and Byzantine mosaic and precious marbles, and the Church itself was the centre of a great mass of other sumptuous buildings, chapels, and offices and monasteries, for the housing of the great body of ecclesiastics charged with the service of the Church and the keeping of the archives. The Basilica of Constantine was worthy of its founder, and many another royal and imperial head was bent there in worship during the centuries that followed; yet what storms and vicissitudes assailed it before it sank away to rise again, like the phœnix of old, in the glorious pile so dear to our hearts to-day! Constantine would not have believed—what it is hard for us to accept even on the word of those who saw it—that a time would come when Rome’s rightful rulers would be constrained to withdraw not only from her, but from Italy, to govern the Church from Avignon; when the Mistress of the World would barely count thirty thousand souls within her walls, and the shepherds of the Campagna should pasture their sheep on the rank grass that covered the steps of St. Peter’s and all the ground around! Were the spirits of the redeemed permitted to contemplate the crimes and sorrows of earth, how some of them would have wept over the apparent decay of this most sacred of fanes, the goal so eagerly sought by all pilgrims, gentle or simple, during the Ages of Faith!