thrilling moment in a man’s life to see Rome in its ruin, what must it have been to see it then in its glory!  We can imagine that, with the profound emotion of his Master when gazing upon the splendour of Jerusalem from the slope of Olivet, St. Paul would look down from that spot on the capital of the world, and see before him the signs of a magnificence never before or since equalled; but alas! as he knew well, a magnificence that was only the iridescence of social and spiritual corruption, as the pomp of the sepulchres of the Appian Way was but the shroud of death.  Doubtless with a sad and pitying heart, he would be led by the cohort of soldiers along the street of tombs, then the most crowded approach to a city of nearly two millions of souls; tombs whose massiveness and solidity were but a vain craving for immortality, and whose epitaphs were the most deeply touching of all epitaphs, on account of the profound despair with which they bade their eternal farewell.  Entering into Rome through the Porta Capena; and winding through the valley between the Coelian and Aventine hills, crowded with temples and palaces, he would be brought to the Forum, then a scene of indescribable grandeur; and from thence he would be finally transferred to the charge of Burrus, the prefect of the imperial guards, at the praetorium of Nero’s palace, on the Palatine.  And here he disappears from our view.  We only know of a certainty that for two whole years “he dwelt in his own hired house, and received all that came in unto him, preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him.”

Of all the splendid associations of the Appian Way, along which history may be said to have marched exclusively for nigh six hundred years, the most splendid by far is its connection with this ever-memorable journey of the great Apostle of the Gentiles.  We can trace the influence of the scenes and objects along the route in all his subsequent writings.  He had a deeper yearning for the Gentiles, because he thus beheld with his own eyes the places associated with the darkest aspects of paganism; the scenes that gave rise to the pagan ideas of heaven and hell; the splendid temples in which the human soul had debased itself to objects beneath the dignity of its own nature, and thus prepared itself for all moral corruption; and the massive sepulchral monuments in which the hopeless despair of heathenism had, as it were, become petrified by the Gorgon gaze of death.  That Appian Way should be to us the most interesting of all the roads of the world; for by it came to us our civilisation and Christianity—­the divine principles and hopes that redeem the soul, retrieve the vanity of existence, open up the path of life through the dark valley of death, and disclose the glorious vista of immortality beyond the tomb.  And as we gaze upon the remains of that road, and feel how much we owe to it as the material channel of God’s grace to us who were far off, we can say with deepest gratitude of those apostles and martyrs who once walked on this lava pavement, but are now standing on the sea of glass before the throne, “How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!”