orders of celibate women--there was still a very considerable number of persons attached to all the important churches, in different positions of ministry. The famous poem of Paul the Silentiary on S. Sophia revels in a recital of the number of persons employed as well as in the beauty of the magnificent building itself. In architecture, indeed, the Byzantine Church of the sixth century was supreme. No more glorious edifice has ever been consecrated to the service of Christ than the Church of the Divine Wisdom at Constantinople; and the arts which enriched it in mosaic, marble, metals, were brought to a perfection which excited the wonder of succeeding centuries. Before we end this sketch of the history of a great age in the life of the Eastern Church, a word must be said about its most splendid and enduring memorial. Among the most striking passages in the {26} chronicles of the age are the famous descriptions by Procopius and by Paul the Silentiary of the splendours of the great church of Constantinople in the sixth century after Christ. [Sidenote: S. Sophia at Constantinople.] In the wonderful art of mosaic, as it may be seen to-day in some of the churches of the New Rome, in S. Sophia--though much there is still covered--and in the Church of the Chora, the West, with all the beauty that we may still see in Ravenna, was never able to equal the East. In solemn grandeur of architecture fitted for open, public, common worship, expressive of the profoundest verities of Christ's Church, it would be difficult to surpass the work of the great age of Byzantine art. Of this S. Sophia, the Church of the Divine Wisdom, at Constantinople, built by the architects of the Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, is the most magnificent example. There the eye travels upward, when the great nave is entered from the narthex, from the arches supporting the gallery to those of the gallery itself, from semi-domes larger and larger, up to the great dome itself, an intricate scheme merging in a central unity. "The length 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.