With the ampler space secured, the building was hurried to completion, requiring less than six years, as against 120 years for St. Peter's in Rome, and 500 for the Milan cathedral, and 615 for that at Cologne. It will accommodate 25,000, and its cost is put at $64,000,000 as against fifty to sixty millions for St. Peter's. It has 107 marble columns, eight (it is somewhat doubtfully claimed) from the temple of Diana in Ephesus, and the same number from the temple of the sun at Baalbec, and the pillars are of variegated colors. The dome soars upward at a distance of 180 feet from the floor, and it is 108 feet in diameter. On account of the absence of side chapels, this seems more impressive than other domes that are larger. All are struck by its seemingly airy lightness, and a contemporary writer spoke of its seeming to be "suspended by a chain from heaven." Justinian at the dedication of all this splendor said jubilantly, "O Solomon, I have surpassed thee." By one act this noble temple has been desecrated. Here in 1054 occurred the formal separation of the Roman Church, representing to-day two hundred million people, from the Greek Church which has at present one hundred million adherents. In that eventful year the legates of the Pope in Rome entered Sancta Sophia in Constantinople, and solemnly laid upon the altar the official excommunication of the Eastern Church, naming its deadly heresies, which seem to the modern man very much like metaphysical subtleties, and then the papal delegates strode out, consigning the Greek Christians to "the devil and his angels." The schism has not been healed to this hour.

We cannot help wondering if the majestic structure, which we have been contemplating, is ever to come into its own again. Its pristine splendor has been dimmed by use

and age, but, after all, its glory yet abides in a wealth of associations, and the pulse would quicken and the heart leap at any prospect of a better future. We can but desire that it may be recovered to its original and Christian purposes. We feel that it would be eminently fitting, if within San Sophia's stately walls might particularly be heard again the ritual of the Greek Church in the language of the New Testament, as that of the Roman Church is heard at St. Peter's in the Latin tongue, which also is that of the Vulgate version of the Bible. The seat of the Eastern Patriarch should be here rather than in the comparatively humble structure on the Golden Horn, where the occupation has been by stress of virtual force. The Turkish tenure of the edifice (the robbers seized hundreds of other churches) may have been for nearly five hundred years, but the preceding possession of Christians, who built it, has been for nine centuries.

Every historical student can understand why Greece could have had aspirations in this direction. Not so very intolerable would be her idea to restore the ancient Byzantine or Eastern Empire, with her Church, which is an offspring of that planted by the Apostle Andrew at Constantinople soon after the crucifixion, in possession of San Sophia. The Greeks dominate the coast civilization throughout this region, and in normal times they numbered 350,000 in the city of Constantinople itself, constituting a larger part of its cosmopolitan population of a million than any other race. A territorial readjustment (this has been the contention of the Pan-Thracian League of Athens) on the proclaimed principle of nationality and along the racial line would give them grounds for laying claim to the very metropolis, in which they predominate, and which for centuries was the capital of the Greek Empire, and which in San Sophia contains what

may be characterized as the mother Church of the Greek faith. The city, before its conquest by the Turks in 1453, was long the seat of the Byzantine or Eastern Empire. It was the mainstay of Christian civilization for ages after Rome had been sacked, and after the Roman or Western Empire had been laid waste by the Barbarians in successive invasions of Huns and Goths and Vandals. While a Grecian metropolis, it for centuries held back the Turkish hordes, as Athens in classic times withstood the barbaric throngs pouring out of Persia and the Orient. So that Greek ambition here is entirely natural.

The last Christian sovereigns to rule over Constantinople and the Empire it headed were Constantine and Sophia. There has been a lingering tradition that when persons thus christened again sat on the Greek throne, they would exercise their sway from the imperial city on the Bosporus. Singularly enough, in the World War crisis the King and Queen of Greece were Constantine and Sophia, sister of the German Kaiser. But they espoused the cause of absolutism rather than of freedom. They refused to keep a treaty agreement with Serbia to come to her relief in the event of an enemy attack. They dissolved the parliamentary bodies in their own country standing for human liberty. They defied constitutional limitations upon their power, and dismissed Venizelos, the true representative of the people. As a consequence, they at last were forced to abdicate. But they were recalled in 1920, after an exile of three and a half years, and theirs may yet be a fulfillment of the traditionary dream. At any rate it has been theirs to see the new "glory that was Greece," for she now no longer stands in dread of her age-long foe. Many a schoolboy with great gusto has declaimed Fitzgreene Halleck's "Marco Bozzaris":