Yet Heaven forbid that I should call Rome decrepit—Rome on whose brow rests, not the perishable crown of earthly dominion, but the tiara of the kingdom of God.
September.
The mission which brought Brother Martin hither is nearly accomplished. We shall soon—we may at a day's notice—leave Rome and return to Germany.
And what have we gained by our pilgrimage?
A store of indulgences beyond calculation. And knowledge; eyes opened to see good and evil. Ennobling knowledge! glimpses into rich worlds of human life and thought, which humble the heart in expanding the mind. Bitter knowledge! illusions dispelled, aspirations crushed. We have learned that the heart of Christendom is a moral plague-spot; that spiritual privileges and moral goodness have no kind of connection, because where the former are at the highest perfection, the latter is at the lowest point of degradation.
We have learned that on earth there is no place to which the heart can turn as a sanctuary, if by a sanctuary we mean not merely a refuge from the punishment of sin, but a place in which to grow holy.
In one sense, Rome may, indeed, be called the sanctuary of the world! It seems as if half the criminals in the world had found a refuge here.
When I think of Rome in future as a city of the living, I shall think of assassination, treachery, avarice, a spirit of universal mockery, which seems only the foam over an abyss of universal despair; mockery of all virtue, based on disbelief in all truth.
It is only as a city of the dead that my heart will revert to Rome as a holy place. She has indeed built, and built beautifully, the sepulchres of the prophets.
Those hidden catacombs, where the holy dead rest, far under the streets of the city,—too far for traffickers in sacred bones to disturb them,—among these the imagination can rest, like those beatified ones, in peace.