By the Rev. D acres Olivier. 31. 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 to a 

 worthy sanctuary that despised community which had hitherto been 

 accustomed to worship in the Catacombs. 



From his time to that of J ustinian — 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 Basilica??. At the 

 outset of this period, Christian churches were for the most part Basilica^ 

 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 Eome. 



There is an example at Treves, which enables us to imagine these 

 kails 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- 



