MR. SPURGEON IN ROME. Way, which he described as "
the British Museum along both sides of the road for eight miles." He was struck with the evidence of the existence of early Baptists in the Roman catacombs as well as at Pisa, for he foand a true Baptistery there also, just as big as the one in the Tabernacle, and he was delighted with a picture of John the Baptist, baptizing our Lord by total immersion. He was properly shocked at St. Peter's : —" St. Peter's was a church indeed. Looked at from the outside the dome seemed squat, and it had nothing of the glory of our own St. Paul's. But it was a thing that grew upon you ; it was so huge and enormous that it filled the soul with awe ; you had to grow big yourselves if you would appreciate it, and its excellent proportions. What shocked him was to see the statue of St. Peter there. Some people said it was the statue of Jupiter, and to that it had been replied, if it was not Jupiter it was the Jew Peter, so it did not matter. The amazing thing was to see the people kissing the toe of the statue. His audience might laugh, but it was actually done. He saw gentlemen wiping the toe with their handkerchiefs and kissing it, old women being helped up to do the same, and little children lifted up to follow the example. There also was the chair in which Peter never sat, and people bowing down to pay homage to it. It was, in truth, a big joss- house ; an idol shop, and nothing better. It was not the worst image-house in Rome, but it was bad enough, and whatever might be said by those who turned to and professed the Catholic faith, if they were not idolators there were no idolators on earth." For the rest, Mr. Spurgeon saw the miraculous print of St. Peter's image on the walls of a dungeon in which, according to tradition, he had been confined,—made when he was pushed against it by the brutality of his guards,—saw, and was wroth in his heart. He looked at the Vatican, saw the Papal soldier higher up on the flight of steps than the Italian soldier, who stood sentry at the door, and was convinced, —with about the same cogency of reasoning as that furnished by the Arch of Titus to the truth of the Bible,—that the Papal Government had been the worst on earth ; but he had his fears for the stability of the Italian Government, as it had sprung out of a political, and not a religious revolution. Such were Mr. Spurgeon's most vivid memories of his journey to the Eternal City,' and his stay there.
Now, we have two remarks to make on this remarkable record of what this very clever and active-minded preacher did, and, as we may assume, did not, see in this journey, He seems to have seen everything on the surface which he could easily measure by an English standard. His spirit was moved within him at the rain caused by the Communists at Paris, whom he evidently com- pared with the mobs of London ; he was indignant at the need- less hurry of his digestion at Dijon, disgusted with the stoves at Lyons, and the gnats and uncleanliness at Nice ; could not con- tain himself about the sluggishness of the Italian railways,—' the slowest things out,'—was overwhelmed with the cunning of the Genoese Jews, amazed at the size of the Coliseum and St. Peter's, and heartily appreciated the Baptizing apparatus of Pisa and the Roman Catacombs. But on the manners, even of the most super- ficial kind, of the countries he passed through (except in relation to the cleanliness of the clothes, a thoroughly English category of thought), he never seems to have made a single comment, except so far as their religious rites offended him. There is not a word on the demeanour of the French or Italian peasantry or the bearing of the Roman women, not a remark (in the report at least) on a single piece of famous sculpture or a single great picture, not a memory of the marble palaces of Rome and Genoa, or of the gardens which give so strange a charm to those palaces ; not a thought of the secular history of the Italian or Roman republics, not even a reference to Columbus—most English of Italian heroes—at Genoa ; not a reference to the Rome of Scipio, or Camel., or Rienzi ; not a trace even of the charm of the Cam- pagua or the orthodox delight In the Coliseum by moonlight. Mr. Spurgeon, though of a remarkably conventional type of cha- racter, is utterly unconventional in his want of deference for what be was expected to admire and didn't, and he speaks only of what interested him, and that was, most of all, the idolatry of Rome ; next its political independence of the Pope ; —then the indications of a sometime Baptist creed still lingering in the Cata- combs; and finally, the bigness of one or two Roman buildings, and the Appian Way, because it was by that that St. Paul approached Rome. We cannot help observing that the narrow- ness of the circle of Mr. Spurgeon's interests in his journey is some- thing stupendous. The musquitoes and the slow trains evidently made much more impression on him than the soft or stately manners of the Southern peoples, than the grandeur of a world of art entirely new to him, than the associations of places with
events which have made history what it is. If Mr. Spurgeon had visited Syria instead of Italy, he would have known much better what he cared to see ; but he would probably have described the solitaries of the Lebanon,—the nearest approach he could find to the Elijah and Elisha of Mount Carmel,—in words rather more contemptuous than he applied to the Roman monks ; and would certainly have considered the Arab Sheik—his best type for Abraham or Chedorlaomer —one of the " slowest things out" in the way of social intercourse.
The next remark we have to make is that whatever there is of real fascination for Mr. Spurgeon in the journey he undertook, was not given to it by interest in Italian literature, but by interest in Hebrew literature,—that such tincture of universal history ' as he had at all, was evidently real to him only in connection with the Bible. At Nice he cared to be on the roof of his hotel, because it reminded him of Peter's trance on the roof of the house at Joppa ; the blue waters of the Mediterranean interested him so much because they had been swept by the storms which wrecked St. Paul, and are still, no doubt, liable to be lashed into tempest by the Euroclydon under some other name. The olive-trees reminded him of Gethsemane, and the Appian Way of St. Paul's journey. Every fibre of interest in his mind that was not English was of Hebrew origin. The Bible was his only passport to interest in those Southern peoples ; it was not only the spiritualizing, but the humanizing and cultivating element of his knowledge. And as it was with him, so was it evidently with the majority of his seven thousand hearers. Should not this make us pause a very long time before we consent to strike out of our popular education the one element which, for a very large section of the English people, constitutes the only real link between the present and the past, between the North and the South, between the West and the East ?
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