is thinking about Giordano Bruno or Julius Cæsar; while the price of
vegetables is as intensely interesting as it was in the year 1600 A.D.
or in 44 B.C.

"How am I to get things in their right perspective? When I left home I
had a pretty clear and connected idea of history. There was a logical
sequence. One period followed another. But in these walks in Rome the
sequence is destroyed. History seems more like geology than like logic,
and the strata have all been broken up by innumerable convulsions of
nature. The Middle Ages were not eight or ten centuries ago; they are
round the next block. A walk from the Quirinal to the Vatican takes you
from the twentieth century to the twelfth. And one seems as much alive
as the other. You may go from schools where you have the last word in
modern education, to the Holy Stairs at the Lateran, where you will see
the pilgrims mounting on their knees as if Luther and his protest had
never happened. Or you can, in five minutes, walk from the Renaissance
period to 400 B.C.

"When I was in the theological seminary I had a very clear idea of the
difference between Pagan Rome and Christian Rome. When Constantine came,
Christianity was established. It was a wonderful change and made
everything different. But when you stroll across from the Arch of Titus
to the Arch of Constantine you wonder what the difference was. The two
things look so much alike. And in the Vatican that huge painting of the
triumph of Constantine over Maxentius doesn't throw much light on the
subject. Suppose the pagan Maxentius had triumphed over Constantine,
what difference would it have made in the picture?

"They say that seeing is believing, but here you see so many things that
are different from what you have always believed. The Past doesn't seem