they demand for themselves a liberty which liberal Churchmen have always endeavored to gain for them, have hitherto too often refused to concede the slightest liberty to others.

The real evils of this tendency, whether in the English or in the Roman Catholic Church, which threatens to swallow up the larger, freer, more reasonable spirit which existed in both Churches fifty years ago, are obvious. The encouragement of a morbid dependence on the priesthood; a vehement antagonism to the law; excessive value attached to the technical forms of theology and ritual; a revival of a scholastic phraseology which has lost its meaning; a passion for bitter controversy and for exaggeration of differences, all these evils are for the most part beyond the reach of legal or ecclesiastical tribunals, and can only be met, as they can be fully met, first by fearless and dispassionate argument, but secondly and chiefly by the encouragement of a healthier tone in the public mind and clerical opinion, as at once a corrective and a counterpoise. What is needed is not to exterminate, but to act independently of, the party which have so often obstructed improvement by mere clamor and menace. The controversy concerning the lesser points of ceremonial has too much diverted the public attention from the substance to the accidents. The adherents of these vestments count amongst their ranks the wise and the foolish, the serious and the frivolous. Let them, in their own special localities, when they do not impose their own fancies upon unwilling listeners or spectators, by these colors and forms, do their best and their worst. Let them add, if so be, the peacocks' feathers which the Pope borrowed from the Kings of Persia, or the scarlet shoes which he took from the Roman Emperors. Let them freely have, if the law allows it, the liberty of facing to any point of the com

pass they desire with Mussulmans to the east, with the Pope to the west, with Hindoos to the north, or with old-fashioned Anglicans to the south. This is no more than is deserved by the zeal of some; it is no more than may be safely conceded to the scruples of all who can be indulged without vexing the consciences of others. But then let those also who take another view of the main attractions of religion be permitted to enjoy the liberty which, till thirty years ago, was freely permitted. Let the rules which, if rendered inflexible, cripple the energies of the Church and mar its usefulness be relaxed by some machinery such as was in use in former times, before the modern creation of the almost insuperable obstructions of the majorities of the four Houses of Convocation. Let each Bishop or Ordinary have the legal power, subject to any checks which Parliament will impose, of sanctioning what is almost universally allowed to pass unchallenged. Let us endeavor to abate those prolongations and repetitions which have made our services, contrary to the intention of their framers, a byword at home and abroad. Let us endeavor to secure that there shall be the option of omitting the questionable though interesting document whose most characteristic passages one of the two Convocations has virtually abjured. Let us permit, openly or tacitly, the modifications in the rubrics of the Baptismal, the Marriage, the Commination, and the Ordination Services, which ought to be an offence to none, and would be an immense relief to many. Let us seek the means of enabling the congregations of the National Church to hear, not merely, as at present, the lectures, but the sermons. of preachers second to none in our own Church, though at present not of it. Let us be firmly persuaded that error is most easily eradicated by establishing truth, and darkness most permanently displaced by diffusing light;

and then whilst the best parts of the High Church party will be preserved to the Church by their own intrinsic excellence, the worst parts will be put down, not by the irritating and often futile process of repression, but by the pacific and far more effectual process of enforcing the opposite truths, of creating in the Church a wholesome atmosphere of manly, generous feeling, in which all that is temporary, acrid, and trivial will fade away, and all that is eternal, reasonable, and majestic will flourish and abound.

CHAPTER IX.

THE BASILICA.

WHAT was the original idea which the Christians of the first centuries conceived of a place of worship? What was the model which they chose for themselves when, on emerging from the Catacombs, they looked round upon the existing edifices of the civilized world?

For nearly two hundred years, set places of worship had no existence at all. In the third century, notices of them became more frequent, but still in such ambiguous terms that it is difficult to ascertain how far the building or how far the congregation is the prominent idea in the writer's mind; and it is not, therefore, till the fourth century, when they became so general as to acquire a fixed form and name, that our inquiry properly begins.

Of the public edifices of the heathen world, there were three which lent themselves to the Christian use. One was the circular tomb. This was seen in the various forms of memorial churches which from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre spread throughout the Empire. But this was exceptional. Another was the Temple. Though occasionally adopted by the Eastern Emperors,1 and in some few instances, as the Pantheon, at Rome itself, it was never incorporated into the institutions of Western Christendom. It was not only that all its associations, both of name and place, jarred with the most cherished

1 Bingham, viii. 2, 4. The Egyptian temples were many of them so used; as at Athens the Parthenon and the Temple of Theseus.

notions of Christian purity and holiness, but also that the very construction of the edifice was wholly incompatible with the new idea of worship, which Christianity had brought into the world. The Temple of Isis at Pompeii (to take the most complete specimen now ex tant of a heathen temple at the time of the Christian era) at once exhibits the impossibility of amalgamating elements so heterogeneous. It was exactly in accordance with the genius of heathenism, that the priest should minister in the presence of the God, withdrawn from view in the little cell or temple that rose in the centre of the consecrated area; but how should the president of the Christian assembly be concealed from the vast concourse in whose name he acted, and who, as with the voice of many waters, were to reply “Amen” to his giving of thanks? It was most congenial to the feeling of Pagan worshippers that they should drop in, one by one, or in separate groups, to present their individual prayers or offerings to their chosen divinity; but how was a Christian congregation, which, by its very name of ecclesia, recalled the image of those tumultuous crowds which had thronged the Pnyx or Forum in the days of the Athenian or Roman Commonwealth, to be brought within the narrow limits of the actual edifice which was supposed to be the dwelling of the God? Even the Temple of Jerusalem itself, pure as it was from the recollections which invested the shrines of the heathen deities, yet from its darkness, its narrowness, and the inaccessibility of its innermost cell, was obviously inadequate to become the visible home of a religion to which the barriers of Judaism were hardly less uncongenial than those of Paganism itself. A temple, whether heathen or Jewish, could never be the model of a purely Christian edifice. The very name itself had now, in Christian phraseology, passed into a higher sphere; and however