But it remains Hadrian’s best monument, substantially what he made it, a vast and perfect round under a vast and perfect dome, a place where the winds of Heaven may sweep down from the central opening—thirty feet across—overhead, and circle round the wide well of the interior and rise to the sky again without having encountered the shock of a single angle on their way. And for more than seventeen hundred and fifty years the rain has fallen and the sun has shone and the stars have looked down on Hadrian’s pavement through the great opening, whence worshippers now, like the worshippers in his time, could raise their eyes and thoughts to the vault of Heaven above. But for two hundred years—as if to partly balance the three centuries of persecution which had preceded them—the Pantheum was closed and none were permitted to pray there, two hundred years during which the silence was never broken, and stars and sun and winds had their way in the stupendous, empty fane. It was the Emperor Honorius of inglorious memory who closed and sealed its bronze doors—the same that guard it now, (and perhaps this and a few other such acts, which showed him at heart a sincere believer, should be remembered to his attenuated credit)—preferring to have it abandoned altogether rather than used for the service of idols. And so it stood, a beautiful reproach, from 399 to 609, when our Pope Boniface told the Emperor Phocas that it was a burning shame not to wash it of pagan stains and consecrate it a Church of the Lord. Phocas—that blood-stained figure who emerges now and then to surprise us by some memorable action—said the Pope was right, and gave him the building to do with it as he liked. And then Boniface carried out the great plan which must have been simmering in his brain for years. The temple, built for the seven deities of the seven planets, was to become the shrine of the bodies of the Saints and be consecrated to the one True God, under the tide of “St. Mary of the Martyrs.” Under that perfect dome of exactly equal height and diameter (one hundred and forty-two feet) he would finally lay to rest all the sacred remains which were still buried in the Catacombs all round the city. But there was much to do first. The rich architectural disposition of the interior required no alteration beyond the erection of a High Altar; the great window to the sky Boniface would not close; when dust and rubbish were cleared away the material preparations were over, but the tremendous ceremony of purification and consecration had yet to be accomplished. For these the illustrious predecessors of Boniface had been inspired to draw up a ceremonial of such profound meaning and glorious diction as remains matchless in the annals of the Liturgy.