Page:Lives of the apostles of Jesus Christ (1836).djvu/284

 present cathedral church of St., now the most immense and magnificent building in the world,—not too much praised in the graphic verse in which the pilgrim-poet sets it beyond all comparison with the greatest piles of ancient or modern art:

"But lo! the dome! the vast and wondrous dome, To which Diana's marvel was a cell;— Christ's mighty shrine above his martyr's tomb.— I have beheld the Ephesians' miracle, Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell The hyena and the jackall in their shade. I have beheld Sophia's bright roofs swell Their glittering mass in the sun, and have surveyed Its sanctuary, while the usurping Moslem prayed.

"But thou, of temples old, or altars new, Standest alone, with nothing like to thee. Worthiest of God, the holy and the true! Since Zion's desolation, when that He Forsook his former city, what could be Of earthly structures in his honor piled, Of a sublimer aspect?"—

Within the most holy place of this vast sanctuary,—beneath the very center of that wonderful dome, which rises in such unequaled vastness above it, redounding far more to the glory of the man who reared it, than of the God whose altar it covers,—in the vaulted crypt which lies below the pavement, is a shrine, before which a hundred lamps are constantly burning, and over which the prayers of thousands are daily rising. This is called the tomb of the saint to whom the whole pile is dedicated, and from whom the great high priest of that temple draws his claim to the keys of the kingdom of heaven, with the power to bind and loose, and the assurance of heaven's sanction on his decrees. But what a contrast is all this "pride, pomp and circumstance," to the bare purity of the faith and character of the simple man whose life and conduct are recorded on these pages! If any thing whatever may be drawn as a well-authorized conclusion from the details that have been given of his actions and motives, it is that Simon Peter was a "plain, blunt" man, laboring devotedly for the object to which he had been called by Jesus, and with no other view whatever, than the advancement of the kingdom of his Master,—the inculcation of a pure spiritual faith, which should seek no support, nor the slightest aid, from the circumstances which charm the eye and ear, and win the soul through the mere delight impressed upon the senses, as the idolatrous priests who now claim his name and ashes, maintain their dominion in the hearts of millions of worse than pagan worshipers. His whole life and labors were