The nightingales’ hour had come, and we, poor human intruders, crept away silently and left the lost garden to them. CHAPTER III LAST DAYS OF THE APOSTLES St. Peter’s First Visit to Rome—Wide Scope of His Work—Rome Destined to Become the Seat of Ecclesiastical Government—St. Peter’s Early Converts—Persecution of the Jews—Life in the Catacombs—Simon Magus and St. Peter—Peter’s Return to Rome—Nero’s Slaughter of Christians—Peter’s Vision—“Lord, Whither Goest Thou?”—Preparation for Martyrdom—Last Epistle—St. Peter’s Successor—Imprisonment of St. Peter and St. Paul—Scenes of Final Tragedy—Crucifixion of Peter—Paul Beheaded—Devotion of Their Followers. The perusal of the histories of Rome, both ancient and modern, inspires the reader with amazement, when he realises that, despite countless invasions, destructions, and changes, certain apparently obscure landmarks of events which took place in the city during the first century after Christ, still exist, uneffaced and unforgotten. Yet so it is, particularly in regard to those connected with the sojourn of St. Peter in Rome. The devout pilgrim may visit them to-day with as little doubt as to their identity as did his ancestor in the Faith nearly two thousand years ago. The Apostle’s first visit to Rome took place, according to St. Jerome, Eusebius, and the old Roman Calendar of Bucherius, in the year 45 of our era. Among illiterate sectarians it was still attempted, when I was young, to uphold the theory, invented by the so-called Reformers, that he had never been in Rome at all. Our separated brethren have since grown more enlightened and do not like to be reminded of that contention, annihilated again and again even by their own historians, notably by Baratier, a Protestant divine who published his “Chronological Inquiry” relating to the Bishops of Rome, from Peter to Victor, at Utrecht, in 1740, and by the learned Protestant Bishop Pearson, who had preceded him in the task of demonstrating incontrovertibly that St. Peter had held that See for many years. On the dispersion of the Apostles after the first persecution in Jerusalem, St. Peter had reserved the perilous enterprise of the conquest of “Babylon” (as the seat of empire was at that time called by the Christians) for himself, but there was other and nearer work for him to accomplish first, and it was only some twelve years later that he found it possible to carry out his intention.