The religion of the primitive Christians must have appeared exceedingly strange to their pagan contemporaries.  The heathen worship was little better than a solemn show.  Its victims adorned with garlands, its incense and music and lustral water, its priests arrayed in white robes, and its marble temples with gilded roofs, were fitted, rather to fascinate the senses, than to improve the heart or expand the intellect.  Even the Jewish ritual, in the days of its glory, must have had a powerful effect on the imagination.  As the Israelites assembled from all quarters at their great festivals—­as they poured in thousands and tens of thousands into the courts of their ancient sanctuary—­as they surveyed the various parts of a structure which was one of the wonders of the world—­as they beheld the priests in their holy garments—­and as they gazed on the high priest himself, whose forehead glittered with gold whilst his breastplate sparkled with precious stones—­they must have felt that they mingled in a scene of extraordinary splendour.  But, when Christianity made its appearance in the world, it presented none of these attractions.  Its adherents were stigmatized as atheists, [463:1] because they had no altars, no temples, and no sacrifices.  They held their meetings in private dwellings; their ministers wore no peculiar dress; and, by all who sought merely the gratification of the eye or of the ear, the simple service in which they engaged must have been considered very bald and uninteresting.  But they rejoiced exceedingly in its spiritual character, as they felt that they could thus draw near to God, and hold sweet and refreshing communion with their Father in heaven.

It is probable that, during a considerable part of the second century, the Christians had comparatively few buildings set apart for public worship.  At a time when they congregated to celebrate the rites of their religion at night or before break of day, it is not to be supposed that they were anxious to obtrude their conventicles on the notice of their persecutors.  But as they increased in numbers, and as the State became somewhat more indulgent, they gradually acquired confidence; and, about the beginning of the third century, the form of their ecclesiastical structures seems to have been already familiar to the eyes of the heathen. [463:2] Shortly after that period, their meeting-houses in Rome were well known; and, in the reign of Alexander Severus, they ventured to dispute with one of the city trades the possession of a piece of ground on which they were desirous to erect a place of worship. [463:3] When the case came for adjudication before the Imperial tribunal, the sovereign decided in their favour, and thus virtually placed them under the shield of his protection.  When the Emperor Gallienus, about A.D. 260, issued an edict of toleration, church architecture advanced apace, and many of the old buildings, which were now falling into decay, were superseded by edifices at once more capacious and more tasteful.  The Christians at this time began to emulate the magnificence of the heathen temples, and even to ape their arrangements.  Thus it is that some of our churches at the present day are nearly fac-similes of the ancient religious edifices of paganism. [464:1]