easily bear
with the silk and gold upon the seat of judgment, nor with ornament of
oratory in the mouth of the messenger: we shall wish that his words may
be simple, even when they are sweetest, and the place from which he
speaks like a marble rock in the desert, about which the people have
gathered in their thirst.

Sec. XV. But the severity which is so marked in the pulpit at Torcello
is still more striking in the raised seats and episcopal throne which
occupy the curve of the apse. The arrangement at first somewhat recalls
to the mind that of the Roman amphitheatres; the flight of steps which
lead up to the central throne divides the curve of the continuous steps
or seats (it appears in the first three ranges questionable which were
intended, for they seem too high for the one, and too low and close for
the other), exactly as in an amphitheatre the stairs for access
intersect the sweeping ranges of seats. But in the very rudeness of this
arrangement, and especially in the want of all appliances of comfort
(for the whole is of marble, and the arms of the central throne are not
for convenience, but for distinction, and to separate it more
conspicuously from the undivided seats), there is a dignity which no
furniture of stalls nor carving of canopies ever could attain, and well
worth the contemplation of the Protestant, both as sternly significative
of an episcopal authority which in the early days of the Church was
never disputed, and as dependent for all its impressiveness on the utter
absence of any expression either of pride or self-indulgence.

Sec. XVI. But there is one more circumstance which we ought to remember as
giving peculiar significance to the position which the episcopal throne
occupies in this island church, namely, that in the minds of all early
Christians the Church itself was most frequently symbolized under the
image of a ship, of which the bishop was the pilot. Consider the force
which this symbol would assume in the imaginations of men to whom the
spiritual Church had become an ark of refuge in the midst of a
destruction hardly less terrible than that from which the eight souls
were saved of old, a destruction in which the wrath of man had become as
broad as the earth and as merciless as the sea, and who saw the actual
and literal edifice of the Church raised up, itself like an ark in the
midst of the waters. No marvel if with the surf of the Adriatic rolling
between them and the shores of their