ROMAN RELIGION
When we think of Rome as the cradle of more than one civilisation, we should also recollect that the Roman has matured two great religions: the religion of ancient Rome and the religion of Western Christendom. Not that we can think of the Roman as a religious people, in the sense in which the Asiatic has always been and remains to this day religious, the sense in which the Hebrew or the sense in which the Egyptian was religious. The Roman never had either the imaginative philosophy which produced the religion of Greece, nor the metaphysical mysticism which made the Hindu faiths. He had in fact in common with the Hebrew, whom he was so totally unlike, a complete absence of the metaphysical temper, of mysticism, of asceticism; and like the Hebrew he did not apply any richness of imagination to religion. What he had was a genius for bringing the other world to the support of this, and what he created was the conception of religion as piety to the State; and it is in this form that it survives in the sympathies and the sentiment of the Roman people. In the pagan world this State was secular, in the Christian world this State is the Catholic Church; but in both cases the spiritual came to the support of the temporal—ancient Rome deified the State by making it the subject of the Roman piety; Christian Rome moulded religion into a citizenship, and the Church became a civitas. Civis romanus sum, "I am a Roman citizen," has never ceased to be the all-embracing formula of Roman orthodoxy.
The original Roman theogony was Etruscan. Behind the veil were the three great gods, the shrouded gods, answering to the Jove, Juno, and Minerva (Menerva) of later times. Round them were their "Senate," the twelve gods and goddesses known to the Romans as the Dii Consentes; and everywhere was the great Latin cult of Vesta, the cult of the hearth. But when Rome was built its first king made of these elements the Roman religion: Numa as a matter of fact appears to have been the Roman Moses, and to have led his people forth not to the worship of their one tribal god who was above all gods, God and Lord, the unique divine realisation of the Hebrew people, to become the root of the monotheism of the Western world, but to the worship of a unit which made of the State the family, of the commonwealth the family's hearth. It was, perhaps, his genius which made the hearth-divinity preside over the little polity and confuse and identify for ever the pieties of the home with the pieties of citizenship. It is these two elements—the theological unit of Judæa and the political unit of Latium—which meeting in Rome in the age of Claudius created the religion of the West. Not once but twice had the Romans come and wrested the sceptre from Judaea; under Titus, and again in the Roman organisation of Christianity venerunt Romani et tulerunt eorum locum et gentem.
We see then that the Roman religion was never a great imaginative creation, but was always a great statecraft, and that Roman religion began to be Roman statecraft when Numa identified the affections and the piety of the hearth with the affections and the piety of the res publica, and made the State the social unit. The original ingredients of Roman religion however had nothing to do with statecraft; they were the ingredients of nature worship, the ingredients brought by a pastoral people. At the source was a reverence for natural things; and old Latin paganism had the peace which belongs to the pastoral life, and to the religion which is founded on the careful observance of potent rites disturbed as yet by no speculative questionings. But it was not free of the gloom of nature-worship—the obverse side of nature-cult—fearful, suspicious, weighted with destiny, as one imagines the religion of Etruria to have been.
SAN CLEMENTE, CHOIR AND TRIBUNE OF UPPER CHURCH
The present twelfth-century building was erected over a much more ancient church, and the site was probably one of the earliest meeting-places of the Christians and may have been that of the house of Clement (the fourth pope) as tradition affirms. A temple and altar to Mithras was found below the lower church. The ancient choir is in very perfect preservation, and its screen, removed from the lower church, is of the sixth century, with portions even of the fourth. See pages [35]-[36], [183], [186]-[7].
It is much later in its history that Rome was captivated by Greek religion and transferred to its crude impersonal gods the brilliant divine personifications of an imaginative people. The Latin had never been familiar with his gods, perhaps because they always remained impersonal abstractions, gods who did not use human speech, but whose language was the lightning-bolt of Jupiter and the wave-lashing triad of Neptune. Into what had really always been impersonal, the Greek came infusing warm human life, making the gods speak the language of men, and inviting men to speak to them in their own tongue. Greek religion was subtler, more individual, freer, more joyous than Latin. The pious customs which constituted the earlier Latin religion had begotten a sense of obligation in the worshipper, but it was conscience as the response to an external stimulus; and the peace it brought was a formal peace, ex opere operato, not a peace brought home to the individual conscience face to face with the Divine. It is because conscience implies more of individualism than ever entered into Roman religion that Roman religion has always remained without it. It was only in the jaded period of the later empire that the Romans turned altogether from the simple, natural, large elements of the religion of their soil to the fantastic, emotional, and complex cults of Isis and Mithras. The simple religion of the field and the hearth, of natural law, of orderliness and decorum, of a piety provoking and sustaining a sense of what was owed to the gods, to the dead, to that State which incarnated the religion of the gods, fell away on the eve of Christianity before the foreign novelties of Greece and Egypt, better suited to the luxuriousness of mind and the growing introspection of a people who had undergone the influence of Greek thought as something indeed always alien to their nature, yet necessary to their place in the world.
When Peter's successors planted a Judaic sect on the ruins of this paganism they had only to follow the genius of Numa's religion in the creation of the Catholic Church—the civitas Dei. Here, we may feel, an essential element of the new religion—the idea of the Kingdom of God—came naturally to supplant the older State religion; and the conception of the nation as a family was eminently germane to the fraternal maxims which grouped round the idea of the ecclesia. But old Rome as it had not stopped to inquire concerning small things, so it had never penetrated to interior things, and the Kingdom of God translated into the language of Rome lost in the process all its interior characters. What was delicate and subtle had never entered into Roman religion, but neither had what was petty, extravagant, or indecorous. Religion was no delicate aroma, but a concrete duty; not an individual choice, nor an individual necessity, nor an individual attraction, but a public rite, a public piety, a public decorum: and these characteristics, as we shall see, inhere in Roman religion to-day.
It is in its liturgy that the mind, or if one may call it so, the temperament of the Roman Church found an ample and worthy expression; and it is in what it lacked as much as in what it put forward that the genius of the Roman rite is seen to differ entirely from that which presided at the making of the mass in every other part of Christendom. The effusion the imagery and the gracious parts added from Gaul, the mysticism of the Oriental, the philosophy of Greece, the Northern inwardness and intimacy, contributed nothing to it. Like Roman religion itself it was not a creation of the imagination or the intellect, nor the outcome of devotional sentiment; it was the creation of the Christian polity clothing its religious data, its religious certitudes, in a becoming garment—giving them a form, expression, a public characterisation. If there was no effusion there was largeness; in place of tenderness there was disengaged from the formal stately public act a perfect liberty of spirit. All through it was the public act itself which justified and consecrated, which was the sanction of the reality the criterion of the fitness of worship. Here besides, sacramenta were not mere signs nor symbola mere figures—they were stately vehicles of universal realities, always and everywhere adequate, worthy, co-ordinating, effectual. Roman ritual was quite bare of those things which in England and France are thought ritualistic; its only ritual consisted in the so-called "manual acts," that is, in the things which had to be done; those very things which the Eastern Church removed from the sight of the congregation, creating a "ritual" as a superfluous symbolism to engage the attention of the people. But the Roman dealt in real things, not imagery; nakedly setting forth his sancta in the dry light of a realism which had no reticence joined to a great reticence of the emotions. This was the temperament of all Roman religion, pagan and Christian, a persistent rejection of all that could be described as unctuous, a setting forth of worship as a great public piety which justified itself. Unlike the Greek whose god must be behind a curtain, the Roman required the divine to be recognised, always and everywhere, in the res publica, in the act which had public sanction, public significance, public utility. The deacons came to the holy table bearing a cloth; one stood at one end and threw the roll across to the deacon at the other end; the oblations of the people were manipulated before the assembly; the wine collected in small phials is poured into a large chalice, repoured into a bowl; the pontiff collects the oblation bread, so do the priests, while acolytes stand at the side holding cloths to receive it; and the same things, not rites but familiar usages, are repeated at the Communion, when bishop and deacons again pour, mix, distribute, wash and put away the holy things and the sacred vessels in the presence and with the assistance of the people of God. Here was nothing "common or unclean"; it was the wisdom of Roman ritual justified of her children.
SANTA MARIA IN COSMEDIN
A very early Christian basilica, in the historic part of Rome by Ponte Rotto and the round temple of Hercules, and on the site of the temple of Ceres and Proserpine. In the sixth century it is enumerated among diaconal churches. It belonged to the Greek colony in this quarter, and its name is derived from the word kosmos. Pavement, ambones, choir, and canopy are of the twelfth century. It has been recently restored to its ancient basilica form, and its many closed windows have been reopened. See pages [28], [31], [35]-[36], [186].
It will be seen at once how widely different was such a conception of worship from that elaborated in the East or which we owe to the vague awe, the dreadful sense of mystery, of the middle age. If we compare the Roman basilica with a Greek or Gothic church this difference is immediately sensible. The former owed nothing to mystery, to dimness. The celebrant faced the people, as he still faces them in all true basilicas; he did not turn his back on them. No early building, indeed, was flooded with light while glazing was in a crude state and wind and weather had to be kept at bay; but the Christian basilica was not darker than other buildings, there was no religious twilight. And as we see it to-day, in Santa Sabina, Santa Maria in Cosmedin, Santa Maria in Domnica, SS. Nereo e Achilleo, Santa Maria Maggiore, or in the ruined basilicas of Santa Domitilla and San Stefano, so it was centuries ago—flooding the mysteries with what light there was because it was the church of a people who cared for no mysteries which could not bear the light. Nevertheless, the simple realism of the Roman ritual by no means meant, for him who could see, the absence of mysticity. Rather it recalled one to the suggestive and sane mysticity which inheres in all common things, in all common uses. Whether the somewhat rugged Roman, with his inattention to small matters and to the unobvious, saw the mysticity of the early Christian service and the early Christian basilica, may be doubted; but though it is certain he had not set himself to create this mysticity it is equally certain that he could not banish it from his churches.
Italian religion is not the same thing as Roman religion. Rome has not been "the most religious city in the world" because it felt religion more than those nations and provinces whose religious character differed so profoundly from its own, but because it was able to institute it on a scale as universal as its own imperialism. The Neapolitan has the superstition and poetry, the emotional impressionism, of the genuine South; but such a repulsive scene as the peasant, upheld by his friends, licking his way to the altar along the filthy church floor could not be witnessed in Rome. It would be difficult to imagine a Roman wishing to be exorcised after putting his head into the English or American church to see the stained glass windows. The "Roman of Rome" leaves such things together with the swallowing of pious-text pills to the unrestrained fervour of some of our English Catholics. The Roman has less religious passion and also much less abandonment to the external than the Southerner or even the Englishman. Rome has had—with one illustrious exception—no great saints since the sixth century; she has been evangelised by saintly visitors from Sweden, from Tuscany, from Siena, as the primitive Church had been edified by the itinerant Gospel visitors called "prophets." From Lombardy, Venice and Umbria, from Parma, Ancona, Florence, Pisa, Naples and the Abruzzi, saints, seers, missioners, mystics, reformers, have brought her their message: but the terrible proverb Roma veduta fede perduta records the impression she has often made on visitors less elect than these. Not Rome but Venice counts as the "devout city" of Italy, and the well-known story of the Jew who became a Christian on the ground that no religion could have survived Roman corruption unless it were divine, was told me in Rome by a prelate as an encouraging episode.
It was said by Matthew Arnold that the Latin people never cared enough for Christianity to reform it; they never thought it worth while, it is true, to break with the Church to find Christianity. The Italian, moreover, had none of the things which made the Puritan—not his fierce dogmatism, the Judaic strain of his piety, his dread of the external, his contentment with doctrinal formulas. Joined to an indubitable attachment to Catholicism—the magic of which inspired the art even of men who did not believe it—the Italian had also too keen an intuition of the real religious issues (as we understand them to-day) to exchange ecclesiastical tradition for biblical dogmatism. Christianity was for him much more of a self-justifying religious tradition and much less of a dogmatism than it was for the Protestant. The Christianity which the Italian would have liked was the Christianity of S. Francis, familiar, meek, tolerant, a genuine discipleship; and it did not irk him to add to this the forms of Catholicism. Like the Reformers, the Italian of the sixteenth century knew little of Church history, but his instinct was on the side of reintegration rather than disintegration of the religious forces enshrining the Christian revelation. The earlier Italian religious movements were almost entirely, like that of the seraphic frate, on the side of informing historical Christianity with the new spirit of Christ. A great horror of the ways of Rome, never echoed by the Romans, did, nevertheless, penetrate religious Italy, and few people realise that it was among the Franciscans not among the Reformers that papal Rome was first branded as the "scarlet woman," the unclean Babylon of the Apocalypse.
Has Protestantism the evangelic marks which the Italian, consciously or unconsciously, lays down for Christianity, and what chance would it have in Italy? It will bear repeating that the Puritan's definition of Christianity would never at any time have found acceptance with the Italian; he never could have cared for reform in doctrine and discipline which did not necessarily, did not primarily, involve a real evangelic reform. When one remembers how very little Protestantism was, in its inception, on the side of dogmatic freedom, and that it put a theological formula before all other matters of the law, one may admit that the Italian though he did not reform may yet have loved true Christianity. In the next place the intense individualism of Protestant worship is distasteful to the Italian who, as we have already realised, does not ask or require that subordination of the society to the individual which religious subdivisions imply, and he would always be repelled by the phenomena of revivalism. It is instructive for us to realise that such things are stigmatised as "buffoonery" by the Italians, whose own elaborate ritual often appears to suggest that description to the Protestant. In the third place, he dislikes the réclame of Protestantism, its self-advertisement, the distribution of tracts at church doors and in the public streets. To his mind no religion worthy of the name can have need of such support. The Sister of Charity and the frate, indeed, appear familiarly among them in their strange dress, not as they, yet part of themselves, reminding the people of the great ideals of their religion, tracts in their own persons but making no réclame.
CHAPEL OF SAN ZENO (called orto del paradiso) IN S. PRASSEDE
This mosaic chapel was erected by Paschal I. in 822. Its great beauty gave it the name of "Garden of Paradise." The church is near the house of Pudens, and is dedicated to Praxedis his daughter. See pages [45], [46], [240].
Indeed the way in which all external expression is regarded by the Italian differs radically from the way in which it presents itself to the Anglo-Saxon and the Teuton. Wagner declared that as soon as the German is called on to be artistic he becomes a buffoon. We in England, also, do not know how to express ourselves by means of external symbols; but the Italian experiences no such difficulty. We are not at home with them; he is. If we use them we exaggerate, he gives them their true proportion and place. He can always be taught by his senses, and he is not, as we are, deluded by them. We, in fine, do not know what to do with the external, he does. His sense of humour is active just where the Englishman's is quiescent; he is not capable, for example, of laying store by this or that little bit of ceremony. The evangelicalism of the Italian, therefore, which one hopes he may some day achieve, will be unlike Anglo-Saxon Christianity—as the catacombs are unlike a "Little Bethel"—he will always require gracious surroundings, he will always ask for the arts to assist his imagination, and prefer fine music, and even the perfume of incense, to the bids for his soul made by the preacher. That is his reticence, and as it differs from the Anglo-Saxon's the latter does not understand it. The Italian will always best respond to a service conceived in the spirit of the mass, with its mystical renewal enacted before his eyes, at once exterior and interior, public and intimate; but with no individualistic note, no dependence on the personal element.
CLOISTERS OF S. PAUL'S-WITHOUT-THE-WALLS
Erected between 1193 and 1208. The most beautiful cloisters in Rome. See [interleaf, page 158], and page [36].
The visitor to Rome must be struck with the fact that the Italians are a more religious people than we. They take more trouble about it. Every morning, day after day, in scores of churches people are going in and out of the heavy leathern door hangings, up and down the steps of the façades; such a spectacle as the visit to the sepulchres on Holy Thursday could not be witnessed in England from one year's end to another. At the street corners, on the stairs, in the shops and the porters' lodges, oil lamps burn before images and shrines; and the deepest curse in the Italian vocabulary is to say La mala Pasqua—"a bad Easter to you." "In all things I perceive that ye are somewhat superstitious," said S. Paul, taking as the pretext of his appeal to the Athenians the trouble and care which he saw everywhere bestowed on the unseen world and the claims of worship: and he could make the same appeal to the Romans to-day with perhaps a greater chance of converting them than the missionary from America. For there is no "provincialism" in Italian religion; the Sunday joys of discussing the anthem, the sermon, the preacher, the details of the service and the congregation, the half mystical half sentimental joy of chewing the cud of sacred things which is so Northern, offer no attractions to the man of the South. He has endless time in the South but no long twilights. In religion as elsewhere the Roman harbours no illusions. The things—petty or precious—which are possible to a people who can maintain illusions, and have no inconvenient quickness of mind, are not to be expected from him. Chadbands in Rome would have no success and no dupes; and your transcendental emotional sentiments about the Pope are perhaps as little understood as your rejection of him. The Roman dreads death, and he refers to the anointing oil as "quella cosa più peggio del viatico"—"that thing which is still worse than the Viaticum." He lives familiarly with his religion and in a sort of child-like simplicity; yet he is sceptical, and we are not, he has no talent for meditative devotion, and we have.
Again, the "respectability" of English Church religion would be as little tolerated as the réclame of sheer Protestantism. There is absolutely nothing answering in the Italian temperament to that pride and pleasure in the respectability of church and chapel going which is so potent a factor in England. The sects which proselytise in Rome are the American Methodists, Baptists, and Wesleyans; many of the better educated preferring to all these the native Waldensian Church. One of the chief attractions of what I have called sheer Protestantism lies in its familiarity as compared with the stiff and terrible "respectability" of the English Church. But this is precisely where Italian Catholicism has itself never failed, and the Catholic in Italy is already accustomed to familiar and simple relations with priest monk and friar—to a complete democracy of sentiment. I was recently motioned to a vacant seat by a dignified French ecclesiastic who was giving out the usual notices from the altar after the Gospel of the mass; a Latin priest will notify the congregation by a gesture when he is about to preach and they can sit down; even an English Catholic priest I know of turns to the people before beginning the Christmas midnight mass to wish them and theirs a happy and blessed festival. These fraternal familiarities do not lack in the Nonconformist chapels, but they would most certainly be deemed out of place and not quite decorous in the English Church. Latin simplicity and human interest, the brotherhood of class, oppose themselves here to English self-consciousness, English inflexibility, the Puritan sense of propriety; and no one can have lived in Italy without seeing instances multiplied in all ranks of the clergy of that familiarity without loss of dignity to which we have not the key. Another thing little understood in England is that the Italian is not "priest-ridden"; he does not depend upon or run after the priest, and the attitude which the priest in Ireland and the minister in Scotland have been able to assume towards the people would never have been possible in Italy. The Roman, more especially, has never ceased to let his satire play upon popes and cardinals, and has known how to do so without scorning dogma and discipline. The bigotte is not an Italian type; and is disliked and distrusted, in either sex, when met. The Roman peasant trudging into the city on Sunday morning halts at the big church of S. Paul in the Via Nazionale, enters, and walks up to the top. A verger at once points out to him his place in the house of God—for this is the American Episcopal church—and he returns to the door: he was uncertain about the church but he is quite certain now, this is not Latin Christianity. But if the Italian comes to London another surprise is in store for him; he goes to the Catholic church and finds he must take a ticket for his footing there—and, often, he goes no more, he has not sufficient threepences and sixpences; he does not mind being poor but he does not think it very fitting to label you from the start as a threepenny Catholic or a six-penny Catholic.
These things show that certain qualities of Italian Catholicism—its familiarity, its independence (for the Italian has greater liberty of spirit though the Anglo-Saxon has greater liberty of conscience)—are the outcome of the Latin spirit and can only be enjoyed where this has sway. It has most influence in Italy and least in Germany. In the city which inherits the sour persecuting spirit of Westphalia, for example, Catholicism is a very different thing from what it is in the land of its birth. There the faithful are a regiment—human automata—standing up and kneeling down with the uniformity of clockwork; every one who enters is suspected, every one who stands at the door creates scandal, the priests are quæstors and their vergers are lictors. Such things certainly have their compensations for the Teutonic and even the Anglo-Saxon mind—but how different they are from the tolerant liberty of the domus Dei in Italy which is, by the same title, the house of the people, with all that familiarity of spirit loved by S. Francis, that utter freedom from self-righteousness! Twice in the course of twelve years, in my personal knowledge, visitors to Cologne Cathedral, in both cases women and Catholics, were assaulted by the beadle in charge and hustled by physical force out of the building, their innocent desire having been to enter the chapel where they supposed the reserved Sacrament to be. The Englishman is no bully, and he does not easily feel that desire to assault which possesses the Teutonic official; moreover if there is one thing he understands it is political liberty—but I may venture on a rough guess that the vergers of some of our cathedrals—S. Paul's not excepted—have the making of a Cologne beadle in their souls.
The question of racial religious characteristics apparently resolves itself into one of compensations. For those who think that Catholicism decorated with the notes of Puritanism, with the sour Teutonic or the dour Spanish accompaniments to religion, or with the florid sentimentalism of the Gaul, loses its birthright, Italian Catholicism will always retain its primacy: but they must bid good-bye in Italy to memories of religious recollection and mysticity, to the beauties and sedateness possible among an interior people who are not wooed by the senses; the beauty of holiness will have to be pictured through a mist of dirt, ignorant superstition, and slovenliness, but not athwart the haze of bigotry, cant, and self-gratulation.
CLOISTERS IN SANTA SCHOLASTICA, SUBIACO
One of the three cloisters in this Benedictine monastery; it was built by Abbot Lando in 1235, and is decorated on the vault with mosaic work by the Cosmati. See page [36], and [interleaf, page 82].
The Roman skeleton of religion has been clothed upon by other races, who have filled in, expanded, and added those things which fitted Christianity for reception among more complex and introspective or more devout natures; but in the eternal city itself, from the catacombs to a solemn mass in S. Peter's, the religion of Latium and the religion of imperial Rome have set their indelible seal on Christianity. The familiar pastoral figure of Christ with his crook in catacomb frescoes, carrying a pail, the milk of the Eucharist, has its primitive counterpart in the shepherds' god Lupercus "driver away of wolves," whose worship was celebrated in Roma Quadrata by the original settlers, clad in their goat skins, who offered him milk as a libation. But he who said Ego sum pastor bonus is gathering the sheep (and the goats), not driving away the wolves, and he is giving the food which is himself to them, not seeking it of them. The Person of Christ had introduced as much of the intimate and personal as Roman religion was capable of assimilating; but the moral implications of this personality—after the first brilliant epoch of the planting of the Faith, with its consciousness of the Person of Christ and its realisation of the moral uses of the Eucharist—were never really appropriated by Rome. Again, the master of ceremonies at papal mass prompts the pontiff at each stage of the function as did his predecessors for Antoninus Pius or Marcus Aurelius when they too officiated as pontifex maximus. The very chairs of the bishops in Rome (where no bishop save the pope or a cardinal in his titular church sits on a throne) are the curule chairs of the Roman magistrates. Nay more mysterious still are the roots of sacred things in Latin soil, for the Roman pontiffs were to adopt that Etruscan pontifical system in which both civil and ecclesiastical functions were vested in the Lucomones. Though Greek theology twice enriched Latin religion, pagan and Christian, nowhere is religion less Greek and more Roman than in Rome. It may be said to be the distinctive feature of Christianity that it is a preaching religion; in France and in England it is more a preaching religion than in Italy, but it is least of all a preaching religion in Rome; and so it has always been. There is no pulpit in the Roman basilica. In the eternal city as elsewhere Christianity in its inception was a Jewish sect, it rose there as elsewhere among the "Jews of the dispersion," and certain Hebrew things, lections, chants, and exposition of the Scriptures, at once took their place in its public worship. But Rome has, here also, preserved less of the Judaic strain of piety than any other Christian Church. The Roman has blotted out the Hebrew element.
At the founts of the Roman and the Hebrew story we come indeed upon one mysterious link—the history of each people begins in a fratricide. As Cain slays Abel so Remus is slain by Romulus, but there the likeness ends; there is no reproach in the Roman story—"the voice of thy brother's blood" cries out through the whole course of Hebrew history.
The act of Romulus founded what was most precious to the Roman, his Kingdom of God on earth—the Roman state, the Roman polity: the act of Cain awoke what lay at the source of Jewish theocracy, the persuasion of sin and of righteousness, the Kingdom based on the conscience. Neither has ever been able to enter freely into the sentiment of the other. Romulus is a hero, Cain is outcast humanity; but the temple to Romulus still evokes more response in Rome than the moral considerations connected with Abel.
SANTA MARIA SOPRA MINERVA
The Dominican church near the Pantheon, called "S. Mary above Minerva" because it was erected upon Pompey's temple of the goddess, was built by Florentines in the fourteenth century, and is the only instance of pointed architecture in Rome. Its unlikeness to the Roman basilica is manifest.
It is the pax romana, the peace of the Roman empire, which was actually established as "the Peace of the Church." The peace, juridical or religious, of a world which acknowledged the sway of Rome. Without were barbarians and heretics, within was the civis romanus. It was a peace consistent with all war save internecine, and Rome, whether political or religious, created in the world it conquered the ambition to live and die united to the greatest of earthly entities—to live and die as catacomb epitaphs to orthodox strangers dying in Rome record—in pace. The Roman citizenship becomes the Catholic citizenship through the mediation of the Apostle who could say "But I am a Roman born," while setting forth imperially a Palestinian sect to the Gentile world. The stranger Roman citizen who dies in Rome for Christ links two worlds with his blood, dedicates that new imperium where Rome may claim that all homage is paid et mihi et Petro, confounds those two things which the master of the Gospel "of the Kingdom" had set apart, the things of Cæsar and the things of God.