Nay, not only is it useless,--it is one of the strongholds which superstition has thrown up for perpetuating its sway over the world. You see these few poor people kneeling before these burning lamps. Their prayer is directed, not upwards through that dome to the heavens above it, but downwards into that vault where sleep, as they believe, the ashes of Peter and Paul. Rome has ever discouraged family worship, and taught men to pray in churches. Why? To increase the power of the Church and the priesthood. A country covered with households in which family worship is kept is like a country covered with fortresses;--it is impregnable. Every house is a citadel, and every family is a little army. Or mark yonder female who kneels before the perforated brazen lattice of yonder confessional-box. She is whispering her sins into the ear of a shaven priest, who receives them into his own black heart. It is but a reeking cess-pool, not a fountain of cleansing, to which she has come. Such are the uses of St Peter's,--a temple where the _Church_ is glorified at the expense of _religion_. Its high altar stops the way to the throne of grace, and its priest bars your access to a Redeemer's blood. And how was this temple built? Romanists speak of it as a monument of the piety of the faithful. But what is the fact? Did it not come out of the foul box of Tetzel the indulgence-monger? Every stone in it is representative of so much sin. With all its grandeur, it is but a stupendous monument of the follies and vices, the crimes and the superstition, of Christendom in the ages which preceded the Reformation. It has cost Rome dear. We do not allude to the twelve millions its erection is said to have cost, but to the mighty rent to which it gave rise in the Roman world. In the centre of the magnificent piazza of St Peter's stands an Egyptian obelisk, brought from Heliopolis, with the words graven upon it, "Christ reigns." Verily that is a great truth; and there are few spots where one feels its force so strongly as here. The successive paganisms of the world have been overruled as steps in the world's progress. Their corruptions have been based upon certain great truths, which they have written, as it were, upon the general mind of the world. The paganism which flourished where that column was hewn was an admission of _God's existence_, though it strove to divert attention from the truth on which it was founded, by the multitude of false gods which it invented. In like manner, the paganism that flourishes, or rather that is fading, where this column now stands, is an admission of the _necessity of a Mediator_; though it strives, as its predecessor did, to hide this glorious truth under a cloud of spurious mediators. But we see in this how every successive move on the part of idolatry has in reality been a retreat. Truth is gradually advancing its parallels against the citadel of error, and the world is toiling slowly upward to its great rest.