Vast porphyry colonnades decorated its approaches, and surrounded a fountain whose waters issued from the representation of a gigantic pine-tree in bronze.

Its double rows of aisles were each supported by forty-eight columns of precious marble.
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.