By the Rev. Dacres Olivier. M.A. 95 
church building in Italy as preceded the date when the style was 
reached with which our Church most corresponds. 
Italian church building commenced when the Emperor Constantine 
in the year of our Lord 312, embraced Christianity, and he was 
the first man to rear a real Christian Church, and to admit toa 
worthy sanctuary that despised community which had hitherto been 
accustomed to worship in the Catacombs. 
From his time to that of Justinian—a period of rather more than 
200 years—there was, in the main, one type of church architecture 
throughout the whole empire of Rome, or in other words I suppose, 
the whole Christian world almost. And that type was borrowed by 
Constantine, as well as by his successors—from the old Roman Hall 
of Justice—the Basilica. I shall be guilty indeed, I hope, of no 
impropriety if I assign to this period the name Basilican. At the 
outset of this period, Christian churches were for the mostpart Basilice, 
adapted as places of Christian worship, and even when Theodosius 
went further, aud built, “de novo,” a church, he retained for his 
model this old hall of justice, the child of imperial Rome. 
There is an example at Treves, which enables us to imagine these 
halls very easily. Like many though not most of the old Roman 
temples, they were oblong, and very lofty in shape—covered in by 
a nearly flat roof—rounded off at one end, and entered probably at 
the other—pierced at this rounded end as well as at both sides with 
one or two tiers of small rounded windows, and built for the most 
part, of unmitigated, unplastered brick. Their interior in short was 
their most picturesque belonging, and this has been so well and so 
vividly described by Mr. Hope, in his still standard work on archi- 
tecture, that I shall venture to cite his description. 
“The principal area, he says, of the Basilica of an oblong form 
was divided, (though not always—witness the Treves Basilica) by a 
double range of columns, into a central avenue and two lateral aisles 
in one of which waited the male, and in the other the female candi- 
dates for justice. These three longitudinal divisions were terminated 
by another of a transverse direction raised a few steps above them, 
whose length embraced their collective width, and whose destination 
was to hold the advocates, the notaries, and others employed in pro- 
