Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/707

The outside of St. Peter's and her three hundred sister churches and the many-storied Vatican give no hint of the wealth and grandeur within them. As in its day pagan Rome drew tribute from all the known world, so the Church of Rome to-day receives gifts from all the Christian world, our own republican country included, and the end is not yet. Even a President of the United States sends his presents to his Holiness the Pope. A look into some of these Romish churches will show that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. All that architecture, sculpture, and fine colors can do, all that art and skill can do to render them beautiful and imposing, has been done in these magnificent edifices. St. Peter's, by its vastness, wealth, splendor, and architectural perfections, acts upon us like some great and overpowering natural wonder. It awes us into silent, speechless admiration. One is at a loss to know how the amplitudinous and multitudinous whole that is there displayed to view has been brought together. The more one sees of it the more impressive and wonderful it becomes. Several other churches are very little inferior to St. Peter's in this wealth and splendor. For one, however, I was much more interested in the Rome of the past than in the Rome of the present; in the banks of its Tiber with their history than in the images, angels and pictures on the walls of its splendid churches; in the preaching of Paul eighteen hundred years ago than in the preaching of the priests and popes of to-day. The fine silks and costly jewels and vestments of the priests of the present could hardly have been dreamed of by the first great preacher of Christianity at Rome, who lived in his own hired house, and whose hands ministered to his own necessities. It was something to feel ourselves standing where this brave man stood, looking