For a comprehensive view of the Coliseum, you should climb the Palatine Hill. The hundreds of arches and windows admit the sunlight, and the building glows, "a monstrous mountain of stone," as Michelet describes it. Tons of the masonry have been removed by vandals. The fountain in which the combatants washed their wounds remains, and the walls of the circus rise to a height of a hundred-and-fifty-seven feet. In yonder "monument of murder" there died ten thousand victims in a hundred days during the reign of Trajan. The triumph of Christianity is symbolised in St Peter's. An impartial chronicler cannot close his eyes to the truth written in the great cathedral. Both pagans and Christians persecuted in turn to the glory of their deities. Force was worshipped alike by emperor and pope. Pagans tortured martyrs in the arena; the Christians burned them in the square. In 1600 Giordano Bruno was tied to the stake, and consumed in the flames, by decree of the Church, after two years of imprisonment. His offence was the writing of treatises attempting to prove that the earth is not flat, and that God is "the All in All." He also dared to opine that there may be other inhabited worlds besides our own. Bruno's last words have echoed through the ages: "Perhaps it is with greater fear that you pass the sentence upon me than I receive it." Under Innocent IV. the Inquisition was established as a special tribunal against heretics. Men of science soon came under its penalties. Copernicus was a teacher of mathematics in Rome, when he conceived his theory, "The Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies," which he dedicated to Pope Paul. Fearing the awful penalties of the Holy Office, he withheld publication of the work for many years, only seeing a copy of the printed volume in his last hours. The book was condemned by the Inquisition and placed on the index. About a century later, Galileo wrote his "System of the World," an exposition and defence of the theories of Copernicus. The Inquisition dragged him before its tribunal at Rome, where he was charged with heresy and compelled to recant or die. We know that he chose recantation, or the fate of Bruno would have been his. For ten years Galileo pined in the dungeon, and his body was flung into a dishonoured grave. Not a man in Rome was safe from the Inquisition. Its courts travestied justice; its terrified witnesses lied, and the accusers were intimidated. Suspicion alone was sufficient to compel arrest and trial, and there was no possible appeal, and no hope of pity or leniency. The Church urged that while unbelief existed, the Inquisition was a necessity, and the chief means of stamping out heretical doctrine. And yet, a few years ago, an International Free-thought Congress was held under the shadow of St Peter's. How truly, "it moves!"