All Saints' Day,

NOVEMBER I.

all the magnificence of imperial Rome, the best pre-served monument is that sublime and wonderful structure known of old as the Pantheon, and in Christian times as Santa Maria della Rotonda. The beauty of this building has been the amazement and delight of nearly nineteen centuries; and its name has long been reckoned synonymous with architectural perfection. It is unanimously conceded to be beyond criticism; and has been described, so far as we know, without cavil, as 'more than faultless.' The characteristics of the Pantheon have been summed up in a line of Lord Byron's 'Childe Harold ':

'Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime.'

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It is one of the edifices, complura et egregia, mentioned in the mass by Suetonius as having been conferred on Rome by the taste and magnificence of M. Agrippa, a distinguished friend and partisan of the Emperor Augustus, whose nephew and son-in-law he successively became by the last two of the three marriages which, in the course of his life, he contracted. On the frieze of the Pantheon, the portico if not the whole of which is thereby still authentically referred to Agrippa, appears the inscription M. AGRIPPA L. F. Cos. TERTIUM FECIT. The third consulship of Agrippa, which is thus fixed as the era of the completion of the Pantheon, coincided with the year 27 before Christ.

With the name of its founder, however, and the date of its dedication, the precise history of the very earliest objects of the Pantheon

determines. The popular belief-which, to confine ourselves to home-bred authors, the venerable Bede adopted, which Bishop Andrewes approved, and which Lord Byron poetically endorsedthat the Pantheon was dedicated to all the gods of antiquity, celestial, terrestrial, and infernal, is à priori shaken by the fact that the religious practice of the Romans demanded the devotion of a separate temple to a separate divinity. An argument of this kind, however, is not conclusive; for it would be absurd to deny the possibility of innovations: and there are some trusted historians who do not hesitate to say that the Pantheon was dedicated to the gods connected with the Julian gens, Jupiter, Mars, Venus, J. Cæsar, and others.' An alternative rationale of its ancient designation is given by Dion, who prefers to settle its name on a mingled base of etymology and symbolism-its dome represented the heavens, and the heavens were the residences of all the gods. But other accounts present us with a plentiful variety. One of these sets forth that the Pantheon was dedicated to Jupiter the Avenger, in compliment to Augustus upon his victory at Actium over Anthony and Cleopatra; and a second, given by an anonymous writer in Montfaucon, is to the effect that the Pantheon was vowed by Agrippa to Cybele and Neptune.' If we may invest the last-named deity with the Homeric attributes of Oceanus, it will be seen that, according to this account, the popular belief is all but amply justified; for all the gods might be said to be worshipped, in effect, where their ancestors and representatives were enshrined. The asserted dedication to Cybele and Neptune is thus understood as an almost absolutely comprehensive one. But, after all, our conclusion must be inconclusive and we must consent to add the dedication of the Pantheon to those countless subjects, so feelingly known to the seeker after historical accuracy, about which investigation vindicates itself as a process by which we successfully arrive at indecision.

When Christianity first became the dominant religion of the Roman empire, the superstitious forces of Paganism were still vivacious and widely spread. It seemed, therefore, too hazardous that its temples should be consecrated to the rites of Christianity, lest the taint of heathen abominations should still linger about them. Destruction, rather than conversion, approved itself as the generally safer course. A series of emperors, beginning with Constantine, carried on, with less or more of vigour, the process of demolition both in the East and West. In the East, the destruction of the temples was well-nigh completed by the Emperor Theodosius the younger, in the early part of the fifth century-a particular rescript occurring in the Code called by his name, that the Pagan temples should be plucked down, as fit to be the dens of devils or unclean spirits. Honorius, the uncle of Theodosius, contented himself with closing the temples of the West, out of a feeling of

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respect for the former architectural magnificence of the empire. 'As we forbid,' ran a rescript of Honorius, 'the sacrifices of the Gentiles, so we will that the ornament of their public works be preserved.' It was this æsthetic patriotism which saved, amongst others, the Pantheon, to undergo a subsequent conversion into a Christian church--an event which took place at a time when the purer religion was fondly supposed to have triumphed over the danger of idolatrous observances. In his ecclesiastical direction of the affairs of the Anglo-Saxons, Gregory the Great rather puzzlingly exemplified the practice at once of Theodosius and Honorius. In a letter, dated June 22nd, 601, to the recent convert, Ethelbert, King of Kent, he exhorts that prince to 'suppress the worship of idols, and to overthrow the structures of the temples; although in a letter, addressed five days before to the Abbot Mellitus -then on the eve of proceeding to England, and afterwards successively Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury-he had instructed him to tell the most reverend Bishop Augustine that he had upon mature deliberation on the affairs of the English, determined that the temples of the idols in that nation ought not to be destroyed. But let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples; let altars be erected and relics placed. For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed, may remove error from their hearts, and, knowing and adoring the true God, may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed.'†

About the year 609, Boniface IV., the successor of Gregory, at two or three removes, in the bishopric of Rome, obtained from the Emperor Phocas a grant of the Pantheon for the purpose of consecrating it to the Christian rite. Bede's simple account of this conversion is to the effect that Boniface, having purified the Pantheon from contamination, dedicated a church to the holy Mother of God, and to all Christ's martyrs, to the end that, the devils being excluded, the blessed company of the saints might have therein a perpetual memorial.' The sometime heathen temple-the structure of which was preserved unchanged-received at its consecration the designation of Santa Maria ad Martyres; and is now, as we have said already, popularly known as Our Lady of the Rotonda, or, mole simply, as the Rotonda. Thus it was that, to the piety of that age, Christ seemed to be receiving 'the heathen for His inheritance.' It is to the circumstance of the conversion of the Pantheon, that the celebration of the Feast of All Saints in the Western Church is to be traced. The festival of the dedication of Santa Maria ad *Bede's Ecclesiastical History; lib. i. c. 32. Ibid. lib. i. c. 30.

Ibid. lib. xi. c. 5.

Martyres was observed on the 13th of May; a feast in honour of All Apostles having formerly been kept on the first of the same month. 'A festival in honour of All Martyrs and Saints,' Mr. Riddle tells us, quoting St. Chrysostom as his authority, obtained in the Eastern Church as early as the fourth century; where it was celebrated on the Octave of Pentecost, our Trinity Sunday.' But it was not till about the year 731 that the Western Church definitely substituted for its commemoration of All Apostles and All Martyrs, the more large and inclusive one of All Saints. In the year just mentioned, Gregory III. consecrated, as Anastasius informs us, a chapel in St. Peter's Church, to the memory of All Saints; from which date the Feast derives its titular or nominal existence. Henceforth

its celebration was constant at Rome; and it gradually spread to the dimensions of an observance of the Church catholic. In the year 834, Gregory IV. removed the Feast from the month of May to the season of its present celebration, the first day of November. A year or two afterwards, the same Pope solicited from Lothario an ordinance for the keeping of All Saints' Day throughout Germany and Gaul. The prince agreed to the ordinance, and his bishops assented to co-operate in promoting it.

The tendency to pay egregious and even unwarrantable respect to the departed whose lives or deaths had presented an aspect of uncommon sanctity, was, as in the order of things was natural, more early to manifest itself than the consolidation of such respect into a festival. It happened very early in Christian history that the intercession of Saints and Martyrs, and especially of the Virgin Mary, was invoked in a profane conjunction with the intercessions of the 'one Mediator between God and Men.' Further on, in the time of Gregory the Great, when it was represented to that Pope that the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mary, and of the Saints, were placed in many churches to be worshipped, he declared that though they were certainly not to be regarded as objects of worship, they might very properly be used to instruct the ignorant, and to stimulate devotion. The disposition to accommodation which arises from a zeal for the conversion of unbelievers, is one which is calculated worthily to excite our interest, and, indeed, our admiration. Yet such a disposition is to be very closely questioned, and very jealously indulged. Subsequent history has all too well shown us that it wanted only time to develop Gregory's allowance of reverence to the effigies of the Saints into a degrading worship of their relics, and into a disgraceful and fraudful commerce in the same. We transcribe from the late Dean Milman's History of Latin Christianity a paragraph, as temperate as it is eloquent, which concisely and philosophically traces the rise and progress of popular Saint-worship. The Dean has just been discussing that phase of the 'Belief of Latin Christianity' which was

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exhibited in the doctrine of Angels; and he proceeds to the consideration of another class of supposed mediators, whose experience of a past incarnation seemed to promise a greater degree of nearness to their votaries, and a more intimate kind of sympathy, than could be expected from mere spirits who had never groaned beneath the weight of clay :

'The angels were not the only guardians and protectors of the faithful against the swarming, busy, indefatigable malignant spirits, which claimed the world of man as their own. It might seem as if human weakness required something less impalpable, more sensibly real, more akin to itself, than beings of light and air, which encircled the throne of God. Those Beings, in their essence immaterial, or of a finer and more ethereal matter, might stoop to earth, or might be constantly hovering between earth and heaven; but besides them, as it were of more distinct cognisance by man, were those who, having worn the human form, retained it, or re-assumed it, as it were clothing over their spiritualized being. The Saints, having been human, were more easily, more naturally conceived as still endowed with human sympathies; intermediate between God and man, but with an imperishable, ineffaceable manhood more closely bound up with man. The doctrine of the Church, the Communion of Saints, implied the Church militant and the Church triumphant. The Christians yet on earth, the Christians already in heaven, formed but one polity; and if there was this kindred, if it may be so said, religious consanguinity, it might seem disparagement to their glory and to their union with Christ to banish the Saints to a cold unconscious indifference, and abase them to ignorance of the concerns of their brethern still in the flesh. Each Saint partook, therefore, of the instinctive omniscience of Christ. While unabsorbed in the general beatified community, he kept up his special interest and attachment to the places, the companions, the fraternities of his earthly sojourn; he exercised, according to his will, at least by intercession, a beneficent influence; he was tutelar within his sphere, and therefore within that sphere an object of devout adoration. And so, as ages went on, saints were multiplied and deified. I am almost unwilling to write it; yet, assuredly, hardly less, if less than Divine power and Divine will was assigned by the popular sentiment to the Virgin and the Saints. They intercepted the worship of the Almighty Father, the worship of the Divine Son. To them, rather than through them, prayer was addressed; their shrines received the more costly oblations: they were the rulers, the actual disposing Providence on earth: God might seem to have abandoned the Sovereignty of the world to those subordinate yet all-powerful agencies.**

The foregoing affords an exhibition, we may observe, under Chris

* Milman's History of Latin Christianity; b. xiv., ch. 2.