Now, what we claim for Pointed architecture is, not that it is the only Christian style which has arisen or is likely to arise, but that it has been more entirely developed under the influence of the Christian religion, and more thoroughly carries out its tone and sentiment than any other style. It is not exclusively, but _par eminence_, Christian. The early Christians naturally adopted the style which was ready made to their hands. That this style, as they found it, was essentially Pagan, it would be absurd to deny; but it was the only one they knew; and, carefully avoiding the types of Pagan temples, they adopted one of its secular forms, and wholly adapted it to their uses. The buildings thus produced were unmistakeably Christian, but it would be absurd to say so of their style. This being nearly identical with that of their Heathen predecessors, it needed a long course of remoulding before it could justly be predicated of it that it was a Christian style--a style generated under the influence of Christian customs, to fulfil Christian requirements, and to harmonise fully with the sentiments of the religion of those who made use of it. The earliest style which may fairly be called Christian was the Byzantine. In the East no sudden revolution had affected art or civilisation, but the Greek empire, founded at the moment when Christianity became the established religion, went on quietly adapting its arts and institutions to its new religion. Art having already degenerated under the later Pagan emperors, and difficulties both from without and from within gradually weakening and undermining the power of the State, it was natural that the changing style should not have that full scope which would have been afforded it had the purifying influences of Christianity acquired full sway during the Augustan age. Painting, sculpture, and architectural carving had lamentably fallen off before they were transferred from the Heathen temple to the Christian church, and even the more mechanical features of Roman architecture had departed widely from their original purity of form. The task prescribed to the new religion was not to take the highest form of Pagan art as it had existed under Pericles or Augustus, and to mould it to its own uses and its own purer and holier sentiments: what she had to deal with was a mere wreck of its former self: all its early simplicity destroyed, its vigour enervated, its magic instinct for beauty gone, its artists fast falling back into barbarism; and that not the savageness of early but untutored art, but the effete and nerveless heartlessness of a race whose glory had departed. It was this lifeless body which Christianity had to awaken to new energy--this dull and spiritless lump out of which she had to mould her future arts, and that at a time when the western half of the empire was about to be crushed to powder by the mighty storm of Northern barbarism, and the eastern portion itself weakened by