In the short pontificates of the Popes, who sat from St. Gregory to Honorius, we may note one remarkable fact. Full six centuries after its erection by Agrippa, as the vestibule of his baths in the centre of the Campus Martius, stood what was called the Pantheon, with its superb portico of granite pillars and white marble capitals, untouched in their beauty—the fairest relic of ancient Rome. It had withstood all the inundations of the Tiber: all the devastations of the Gothic war: all the injuries of time. Every winter the floods forced themselves up over its floor: day and night the dome, through its aperture, received the waters of heaven. The images of Augustus(11) and Agrippa probably stood still in their niches: the beams of gilded brass supported its roof, covered with the gilt tiles of bronze, which neither Vandal, nor Goth, nor Byzantine robber had yet carried away. Pliny had given it the name of Pantheon: Dio Cassius had seen in it the statues of Mars and Venus, and of the deified Cæsars. A tablet of the Fratres Arvales has been found, dating from the year 59, in Nero’s time, and showing that worship to the pagan gods was then offered in it. Pope Boniface IV. beheld this wonder of ancient art, and longed to make a church of that beautiful dome which hung like the vault of heaven over the broadest expanse ever covered by a roof. He asked it of the emperor Phocas, and received it as a gift. He assembled the clergy of Rome, and a procession, singing hymns, entered that noble doorway, and the Pope sprinkled with holy water the marble-encrusted walls, from which every vestige of heathendom was cleared away. The “Gloria in Excelsis” resounded for the first time in that dome from which Michael Angelo took his most beautiful creation. The temple of all the demons was purified: and Pope Boniface IV. preserved it for all succeeding ages, under its dedication to the Ever-virgin Mother of God, and all martyrs. So it was saved from becoming, in mediæval times, the hold of some noble robber. And from it the devotion to All Saints, on the 1st November, and for All Souls, on the 2nd, was propagated amongst the nations of the West. What was originally a Roman festival passed beyond the Alps and the dome of Agrippa, the partner of Augustus and the husband of Julia, and through her progenitor of Cæsars, became the shrine from which the glorious office of all the saints in the Church triumphant, and that of intercession for all souls in the Church suffering, went forth to the Christian world.