To the sessions of sweet silent thought Would summon up remembrance of things past,[667] is this long corridor of inscriptions than any of the four thousand 396 apartments of that vast palace of the popes, with their priceless bronzes, marbles, gems, frescoes, and other remains of classic art. He will turn away from the noble galleries where the Laocoon forever writhes in stone, and Apollo--lord of the unerring bow--watches his arrow hurtling toward its mark, to the plain marble slabs that line these walls. In the rude inscriptions here recorded he will discover some of the strongest evidences of revealed religion and most striking proofs of the purity of the faith, simplicity of worship, and uncorrupted doctrines of the early church. Thus primitive Christianity lifts its solemn protest in these halls of wealth and power, in the very palace of the popes, against the anti-Christian system of which they are the representatives. Here the monuments of pagan and of Christian Rome confront each other. The spectator stands between two worlds of widest divergence, and cannot but be struck with the immense contrast between them. “I have spent,” says M. Rochette, “many entire days in this sanctuary of antiquity, where the sacred and profane stand face to face in the written monuments preserved to us, as in the days when paganism and Christianity, striving with all their powers, were engaged in mortal conflict.”[668] On the one side are recorded the pride and pomp of worldly rank, the lofty titles and manifold distinctions of every class, from divinities to slaves. The undying historic names of Rome’s mighty conquerors, the leaders of her cohorts and legions, mingle with those of the proud patrician citizens, and alike display on their sepulchral slabs the august array of prænomen, nomen, and cognomen, which attest their lofty social position or civil power.[669] The 397 costly carving and elaborate bas reliefs of many of these monuments indicate the wealth of him whom they commemorate. The elegantly turned classic epitaph--with its elegiac hexameters breathing the stern and cold philosophy of the Stoa, or an utter blankness of despair concerning the future, or, perchance, a querulous and passionate complaining against the gods--shows how the races without the knowledge of the true God met the awful mystery of death. The numerous altars to all the fabled deities of the Pantheon, the vaunting inscriptions and lofty attributes ascribed to the shadowy brood of Olympus--“unconquered, greatest, and best”--read, by the light of to-day, like an unconscious satire on the high pretensions of those vanished powers. The fragmentary edicts of the emperors, the numerous military trophies, and the records of complicated political orders, indicate the might and majesty of the Empire in the days of its utmost power and splendour.