h and the breadth and the height of it are equal" is the
exclamation which seems forced from the beholder: never was there a
church so vast yet so symmetrical, so admirably designed for the
participation of all worshippers in the great act of worship. And the
splendid pillars, brought from Baalbek of the old heathen days, wrought
on the capitals with intricate carvings, with emblems and devices and
monograms, the finely decorated doors, and the gigantic mosaic seraphim
on the walls, still in the twentieth century dimly image something of
the glowing worship of the {27} sixth. Then the "splendour of the
lighted space," glittering with thousands of lights, gave "shine unto
the world," and guided the seafarers as they went forth "by the divine
light of the Church itself." Traveller after traveller, chronicler
after chronicler, records impressions of the glory and beauty that
belonged to the great Mother Church of the Byzantine rite.
Historically, perhaps no church in the world has seen, at least in the
Middle Ages, so many scenes that belonged to the deepest crises of
national life. From the day when the great emperor who built it
prostrated himself before God as unworthy to make the offering of so
much beauty, to the day when Muhammad the conqueror (says the legend)
rode in over the heaps of Christian dead, it was the centre, and the
mirror, of the Church's life in the capital of the Empire. And that is
what the worship of the East has always striven to express. It is
immemorial, conservative beyond anything that the West can tolerate or
conceive; but it belongs, in the present as in the past, to the closest
thoughts, the most intimate experiences, of men to whom religion is
indeed the guide of life. The Church of S. Sophia, the worship of the
East, are the living memorials of the great age of the great Christian
emperor and theologian of the sixth century.

And the fact that this building was due to the genius and power not of
the Church, but of Justinian, leads us back to the significance of the
State authority in the ecclesiastical history of the East.

As it was said in England that kings were the Church's nursing fathers,
so in the Eastern Empire might the same text be used in rather a
different {28} sense. The Church was in power before the Empire was
Christian; but the Christian Empire was ever urgent to proclaim its
attachment to the Church and to guarantee its protection. The imperial
legislation of the