The Cathedral of Torcello was so injured by the repairs under the Austrians that one can find little pleasure in visiting it. The one interesting feature is the arrangement of the chancel, where the semicircular seats rise one above the other, and the bishop's throne in the centre, reached by a steep staircase, towers above all. Authorities agree that the fittings of this apse give a better idea of the way in which apses were originally arranged than does any other church, either of the same period with this (seventh century), or even earlier. It is most unusual; and Ruskin throws such a charm about it that it is pure pleasure to read what he says of it:-- "There is one circumstance which we ought to remember as giving peculiar significance to the position which the episcopal throne occupies in the 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 birth, {169} from which they were separated forever, they should have looked upon each other as the disciples did when the storm came down on Tiberias Lake, and have yielded ready and loving obedience to those who ruled them in His name who had there rebuked the winds and commanded stillness to the sea. And if the stranger would yet learn in what spirit it was that the dominion of Venice was begun, and in what strength she went forth conquering and to conquer, let him not seek to estimate the wealth of her arsenals or numbers of her armies, nor look upon the pageantry of her palaces, nor enter into the secrets of her councils; but let him ascend the highest tier of the stern ledges that sweep round the altar of Torcello, and then, looking as the pilot did of old along the marble ribs of the goodly temple-ship, let him repeople its ruined deck with the shadows of its dead mariners, and strive to feel in himself the strength of heart that was kindled within them, when first, after the pillars of it had settled in the sand, and the roof of it had been closed against the angry sky that was still reddened by the fires of their homesteads,--first, within the shelter of its knitted walls, amidst the murmur of the waste of waves and the beating of the wings of the sea-birds round the rock that was strange to them,--rose that ancient hymn, in the power of their gathered voices: '_The sea is His, and He