Its flat ceiling
was adorned with beams of gilt metal, rescued from the pollution of
heathen temples. Its walls were decorated with large paintings of
religious subjects, and its tribunal was studded with elegant mosaics.
Thus it rose, simple and yet sublime, awful and yet alluring; in this
its beginning, a type of the dawn of the worship which it was elevated
to represent. But when, flushed with success, the priests seized on
Christianity as their path to politics and their introduction to power,
the aspect of the church gradually began to change. As, slowly and
insensibly, ambitious man heaped the garbage of his mysteries, his
doctrines, and his disputes, about the pristine purity of the structure
given him by God, so, one by one, gaudy adornments and meretricious
alterations arose to sully the once majestic basilica, until the
threatening and reproving apparition of the pagan Julian, when both
Church and churchmen received in their corrupt progress a sudden and
impressive check.
The short period of the revival of idolatry once passed over, the
priests, unmoved by the warning they had received, returned with renewed
vigour to confuse that which both in their Gospel and their Church had
been once simple.
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