U. G.: "These questions are becoming too hard for me. Come, let me show you the tomb which contains the bones of St. Peter and St. Paul. Only half of their bodies are preserved here, the other portion of St. Peter's being in the Church of St. John Lateran and the other portion of St. Paul's at the magnificent basilica of St. Paul's without the walls."
"A circle of eighty-six gold lamps is always burning around the tomb of the poor fisherman of Galilee.... Hence one can gaze up into the dome, with its huge letters in purple-blue mosaic upon a gold ground (each six feet long)—Tu es Petrus, et super hanc petram ædificabo ecclesiam meam, et tibi dabo claves regni coelorum.' Above this are four colossal mosaics of the Evangelists.... The pen of St. Luke is seven feet in length."
But we must not permit ourselves to be diverted from our proper subject by the vastness and splendor of the building, natural as it is to do so when standing under this matchless dome. The four huge piers which support the dome are used as shrines for the four great relics of the church, viz.: 1. The lance of St. Longinus, the soldier who pierced the Saviour's side; 2. A portion of the true cross; 3. The napkin of St. Veronica, containing the miraculous impression of our Lord's face; and 4. The head of the apostle Andrew.
I did not see these relics myself, as I was in the East when they were exhibited, but on April 11th, the day before Easter, other members of my party did, that is, they saw all of them but Andrew's head, and from a letter written me by the youngest of my correspondents in my own family, giving not only description, but drawings of the spear head, the cross and the handkerchief in their several frames, I infer that, notwithstanding the great height of the Veronica balcony from which they are exhibited, my young correspondent and his companions fared better in the matter of a good view than Fritz in Chronicles of the Schönberg Cotta Family, who says: "To-day we gazed on the Veronica—the holy impression left by our Saviour's face on the cloth S. Veronica presented to him to wipe his brow, bowed under the weight of the cross. We had looked forward to this sight for days, for seven thousand years of indulgence from penance are attached to it. But when the moment came we could see nothing but a black board hung with a cloth, before which another white cloth was held. In a few minutes this was withdrawn, and the great moment was over, the glimpse of the sacred thing on which hung the fate of seven thousand years."
FOOTNOTES:
[9] Later.—This is the church in which the late Pope Leo XIII. is to be buried.
[10] The Roman Catholic Church in Italy, Alexander Robertson, p. 113.
[11] Hare, II., 93.
[12] Hare's Walks in Rome, II., pp. 166, 167.
[13] Hare, II., 45.