The whole arrangement of the church is symbolised at much length, as setting forth the different divisions of the laity and the states of the faithful with respect to advance in holiness. The great portico symbolised God the Father: the side porticoes the other Two Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. The seats represented the souls of the faithful, upon which, {lxxiii} as on the Day of Pentecost, the cloven tongues would descend and _sit_ upon each of them. 'The revered and great and only altar, what could this be but the spotlessness of soul and holiness of holies of the common Priest of us all?' [Footnote 48] Once more, the parallel between the spiritual and the material Churches being continued, the Word, the Great Demiurgus of all things, is said to have Himself made upon earth a copy of the heavenly pattern which is the Church of the Firstborn written in heaven, Jerusalem that is above, Sion the Mount of God, and the city of the living God. [Footnote 48: Euseb. H. E., x, 65.] It appears then that throughout this description a symbolical meaning is found attached to the material church: and this not far-fetched or now first fancifully imagined; but appealing, as it seems, to what the auditors would be prepared to grant, and admitted by the historian without a comment, as one specimen of a class. We have before remarked that every notice of the particular distribution of a church for the reception of the different classes of Christians, may be taken as an argument on our side: for if it can be shown that the form of churches was not arbitrary, but was adapted to certain peculiar wants, it must be granted that there was some particular law of design, and that law connected with Ritual: and then, as before pointed out, this arrangement becomes itself symbolical, and that _intentionally_. We shall only refer here to a passage quoted by Bingham, [Footnote 49] in which S. Gregory Thaumaturgus describes the places in church assigned respectively to the five degrees of Penitents. Mede [Footnote 50] argues for the _existence_ of churches in the first three centuries, from the universal custom of praying towards the East, the necessity of {lxxiv} providing distinct places for the Penitents, Hearers, Catechumens, and Faithful, and from the patterns of the Jewish _proseuchae_ and synagogues. But all these arguments seem to tell as much for some particular form of churches as for their existence: that is they prove that the earliest churches were designed on rules which, even if not intentionally symbolical (though we have shown that many were so), became by a natural process intentional among later church-builders. [Footnote 49: Greg. Nyssen, iii, 567.] [Footnote 50: Discourse of Churches, Folio Edn., p. 333.]