The idea of St. Sophia is reduplicated throughout the Eastern Church. It is a-gleam in millions of ikons, endeavours to paint the _all_ of Christianity and the living breathing Church itself, the Bride. It is the inspiration of such a cathedral as that of St. Basil, that marvellous mediæval passion in stone built by Ivan the Terrible in the Red Square of Moscow—hence its many colours, its extraordinary diversity of shapes, its harmonisation of incongruous angles and solecisms of form, its many chapels and standing places by which the Byzantine architect endeavoured to suggest that each and every one who entered the cathedral might find a particular place where it was most fitting he should stand and praise, a particular chapel where he might kneel in secret. Astonishing to find the architectural idea coming up again in such an unlikely place as New York, in the cathedral of St. John, which will be the largest church in the world, and pre-eminently the cathedral of the West. Into the walls and body of this new cathedral bits of every kind of stone existent in America are being built. St. John, built from the substance of the world, will be the counterpart of St. Sophia, built of the substance of the other world, and having the dust of martyrs between each tenth stone—the cathedral of the way of Martha and the West balancing the cathedral of the way of Mary and the East. * * * * * Roman Catholicism was founded on the rock of apostolic succession. St. Peter’s represents the House built upon a rock, the House that shall survive all storms and tempests. Eastern Christianity or Orthodoxy was founded on St. Sophia, the Holy Wisdom; and whereas Catholicism is a House built on the earth, Orthodoxy is a House vouchsafed from heaven, the new Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven ... as a bride adorned for her husband. The word is one and the same. But the Roman Catholic is the least free of individuals, religiously. The rock of apostolic succession is the rock of infallibility. And whereas a foundation of wisdom implies freedom of individual thought, a foundation of infallibility implies intellectual and religious servitude. A Roman Catholic who thinks for himself in religious matters has already begun to be a heretic and has a sin to confess to his father confessor. * * * * * The service in one of our London churches frequently ends on the antiphone: I am the Living Bread, Which came down from heaven. Whoso eateth Me shall live for ever.