As soon as Mass was over, the troops dispersed and I was at liberty to explore the church. What a relief to find the pictures covered! it almost reconciled me to Lent. What a delight to find all the details unobtrusive--all the chapels modestly in the background, instead of parading their comparative insignificances. Nothing blank or bald: a broad, single effect like the Sistine Sibyls and Prophets, or the Madonna of the Fish, or the Idylls of the King. In the ages of faith, the monk, the noble, and the state went hand in hand in erecting and adorning the house of God--in making it gigantic, beautiful, imperishable, complete. Not only in Italy, but throughout Europe, there was a silent compact between the present and the future--an assurance that the inspiration of to-day would remain the inspiration of tomorrow--an abiding conviction that the creed of the sire would remain for ever precisely the creed of the son. In this belief, the founders of the great churches cut out work for three centuries with less misgiving than we should now have in projecting for as many years. The builders of the English abbeys foresaw not the day when the torch and sword and hammer of the descendant would be uplifted to burn, to stain, to shatter a repudiated inheritance; when the rites of new and hostile doctrines would affront the few ancestral temples that were spared. The architects of St. Peter's foresaw not the large revolt for which they were unconsciously paving the way in Germany. Like ourselves, to be sure, they had the record of the past before them. They knew, as well as we, that naught was left of Corinth, and next to nothing of Athens, and little of ancient Rome save her Colosseum and her Pantheon; that the temple of Solomon was ashes; that the obelisks were pilgrims to the West; that the _tented_ sepulchres of the _shepherd_ kings stood solitary and meaningless in the desert. {198} But, in spite of all this panorama of mutation and decay, they could not subdue the sacred instinct of building for eternity. Christianity was so charged with promise, triumph, and immortality that they fancied her tabernacles as indestructible as herself. There was a joyous trust, too, that "the time was at hand," a confident expectation that those domes and spires would abide till the coming of the Son of man in the glory of his Father with his angels.