On the connection between the building of S.Peter's and the Reformation I have touched already.[45] This mighty temple is the shrine of Catholicity, no longer cosmopolitan by right of spiritual empire, but secularised and limited to Latin races.

At the same time it represents the spirit of a period when the Popes still led the world as intellectual chiefs.

As the decree for its erection was the last act of the Papacy before the schism of the North had driven it into blind conflict with advancing culture, so S.Peter's remains the monument to after ages of a moment when the Roman Church, unterrified as yet by German rebels, dared to share the mundane impulse of the classical revival.

She had forgotten the catacombs and ruthlessly destroyed the Basilica of Constantine.

By rebuilding the mother church of Western Christianity upon a new plan, she broke with tradition; and if Rome has not ceased to be the Eternal City, if all ways are still leading to Rome, we may even hazard a conjecture that in the last days of their universal monarchy the Popes reared this fane to be the temple of a spirit alien to their own.