Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/205

Rh imperial recognition of Christianity. The emperor himself was foremost in promoting the work, especially in his new city of Constantinople, but also at Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

The model for this church architecture was not the pagan temple, which was manifestly unsuitable for the purposes of public worship. The temple was the home of a god, not a place of assembly. Here priests sacrificed, and worshippers prayed, made vows, brought votive offerings. There were special festivals, and some temples were the scenes of the celebration of mysteries. None of these functions required the large assembly hall needed by a Christian congregation. Accordingly, although in a few cases, as with the Pantheon at Rome, a pagan temple came to be consecrated as a Christian Church, the Christians did not take the temple as the model for their place of worship. They found this in the basilica, or Hall of Justice, the Roman law court. In consequence the large churches have come to be called "basilicas." Eusebius gives us the earliest description of such a church in his account of the new building at Tyre, at the dedication of which an Arian council was summoned. It stood in a great open space enclosed by a wall, and was approached through a magnificent portico, which led into a quadrangular atrium, surrounded with interior porticoes, and having a fountain in the centre for washing the hands and feet, as we see now at Mohammedan mosques; beyond the atrium was the basilica proper, a building roofed with cedar wood and having side aisles and galleries. There were chairs for the bishop and his clergy round about the altar at the end of the church, fenced off from the rest of the nave with lattice work. The Apostolical Constitutions knows of no such separation between the clergy and the laity, showing that this significant barrier must have been quite a recent innovation, for our present redaction of that work cannot be earlier than the fourth century. Yet we read in