392 LITE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY CHAP. XVI 



can. reconstruct the body of the primitive Church. She 

 was a simple maiden enough and vastly more attractive 

 than the bedizened old harridan of the modern Papacy, 

 so smothered under the old clothes of Paganism which 

 she has been appropriating for the last fifteen centuries 

 that Jesus of Nazareth would not know her if he met 

 her. 



I have been to several great papistical functions 

 among others to the festa of the Cathedra Petri in St. 

 Peter's last Sunday, and I confess I am unable to under- 

 stand how grown men can lend themselves to such 

 elaborate tomfooleries nothing but mere fetish worship 

 in forms of execrably bad taste, devised, one would 

 think, by a college of ecclesiastical man-milliners for the 

 delectation of school-girls. It is curious to notice that 

 intellectual and aesthetic degradation go hand in hand. 

 You have only to go from the Pantheon to St. Peter's to 

 understand the great abyss which lies between the Roman 

 of paganism and the Roman of the papacy. I have seen 

 nothing grander than Agrippa's work the popes have 

 stripped it to adorn their own petrified lies, but in its 

 nakedness it has a dignity with which there is nothing 

 to compare in the ill - proportioned, worse decorated 

 tawdry stone mountain on the Vatican. 



The best thing, from an aesthetic point of view, that 

 could be done with Rome would be to destroy every- 

 thing except St. Paolo fuori le Mura, of later date than 

 the fourth century. 



But you will have had enough of my scrawl, and your 

 mother wants to add something. She is in great force, 

 and is gone prospecting to some Palazzo or other to tell me 

 if it is worth seeing. Ever your loving father, 



T. H. HUXLEY. 



