After looking often at the pictures of St. Sebastian, I have now seen his church founded by Constantine: he lies here in white marble, done by Bernini; and here are more marvellous columns.--I am tired of looking out words to express their various merits.
The catacombs attract me more strongly; here, and here alone, can one obtain a just idea of the melancholy lives, and dismal deaths, endured by those who first dared at Rome to profess a religion inoffensive and beneficial to all mankind. San Filippo Neri has his body somewhat distinguished from the rest of these old pious Christians, among whom he lived to a surprising age, making a cave his residence. Relics are now dug up every day from these retreats, and venerated as having once belonged to martyrs murdered for their early attachment to a belief now happily displayed over one quarter of the world, and making daily progress in another not discovered when those heroic mortals died to attest its truth. There is however great danger of deception in digging out the relics, these catacombs having been in Trajan’s time made a burial-place for slaves; and such it continued to be during the reign of those Roman emperors who despised rather than persecuted the new religion in its infancy. The consciousness of this fact should cure the passion many here shew for relics, the authenticity of which can never be ascertained. Those shewn to the people in St. Peter’s church one evening in the holy week, all came from here it seems; and loudly do our Protestant travellers exclaim at their idolatry who kneel during the exposure; though for my life I cannot see how the custom is _idolatrous_. He who at the moment a dead martyr’s robe is shewn him, begs grace of God to follow that great example, is certainly doing no harm, or in any wise contradicting the rules of our Anglican church, whose collects for every saint’s day express a like supplication for power to imitate that saint’s good example; if once they worship the relics indeed, it were better they were burned; and to say true, they should not be exposed without a sermon explaining their use, lest vulgar minds might be unhappily misled to mistake the real end of their exposure, and profanely substitute the creature for the Creator. Meanwhile no one has a right to ridicule the love of what once belonged to a favourite character, who has ever felt attachment to a dead friend’s snuff-box, or desire of possessing Scipio Æmilianus’s tooth.