Few buildings have been the object of such passionate attachment as the great church of Constantinople. To the Greeks of the Lower Empire, St. Sophia was all that their temple was to the Jews--the centre of the national life and the focus of the national religion. There a long train of princes, proudly styling themselves emperors of the Romans, had been consecrated and had worshipped--there a succession of patriarchs had edified the Church, presided over great councils, and defied the rival bishops of Old Rome. The glories of St. Sophia proclaimed that the city of Constantine was not merely the capital of the East, but the one city which had been born and educated in the bosom of the faith, and never polluted by the worship of the older gods. To the modern Greek the gilded Crescent that has supplanted the Cross on its aërial dome is at once a sacrilege and a humiliation, a flashing symbol of political and religious degradation, telling too plainly that the barbarian rules in the palaces of the Cæsars, and that the faith once delivered by the Saviour at Jerusalem has been driven from its noblest temple by the Prophet of Arabia. Nor can the venerable edifice be without interest to all of us when we remember how it is identified with the greatest triumphs and the greatest reverses of Christianity, and with the two great epochs of Christian history--the death of paganism and the birth of free thought: its erection was a proof of the former, and its capture led directly to the Renaissance.