eat periods of church
architecture, their builders were untrammelled by any utilitarian
considerations; they built for the glory of God, for their own glory
perhaps, in honour of the saints; and their work, where it survives, is
(as it were) a petrification of their beliefs and ideals. This is, of
course, more true of the middle ages than of the times that preceded and
followed them; the Church under the Roman empire hardly as yet realized
the possibilities of "sermons in stones," and took over, with little
change, the model of the secular and religious buildings of pagan Rome;
the Renaissance, essentially a neo-pagan movement, introduced disturbing
factors from outside, and, though developing a style very characteristic
of the age that produced it, started that archaeological movement which
has tended in modern times to substitute mere imitations of old models
for any attempt to express in church architecture the religious spirit
of the age.

The earliest type of Christian Church, out of which the others
developed, was the basilica. The Church, emerging in the 4th century
into imperial favour, and established as part of the organization of the
Roman empire, simply adopted that type of secular official building
which she found convenient for her purposes. The clergy, now Roman
officials, vested in the robes of the civil dignitaries (see VESTMENTS),
took their seats in the apse of the basilica where the magistrates were
wont to sit, in front of them the holy table, facing the congregation.
The _cancelli_, the lattice or bar, which in the civil tribunal had
divided the court from the litigants and the public, now served to
separate clergy and laity. This arrangement still survives in some of
the ancient churches of Rome; it has been revived in many Protestant
places of worship. It symbolized principally an official distinction;
but with the theocratizing of the empire in the East and its decay in
the West the accentuation of the mystic powers of the clergy led to a
more complete separation from the laity, a tendency which left its mark
on the arrangements of the churches. In the East the _cancelli_, under
the influence possibly of the ritual of the Jewish temple, developed
into the _iconostasis_, the screen of holy pictures, behind the closed
doors of which the supreme act of the eucharistic mystery is hidden from
the lay people. In the West the high altar was moved to the east end
(the _presbyterium_) with a space before