as been spoken of. This was called
the _Sanctuary_, and was set apart for the clergy only. The women sat in
church apart from the men; sometimes they were in the aisles, and
sometimes in galleries. Churches generally had a court in front of them
or about them, in which were the lodgings of the clergy, and a building
for the administration of baptism, called the _Baptistery_.

[17] Page 81.

In the early times, churches were not adorned with pictures or statues;
for Christians were at first afraid to have any ornaments of the kind,
lest they should fall into idolatry like the heathen. No such things as
images or pictures of our Lord, or of His saints, were known among them;
and in their every-day life, instead of the figures of gods, with which
the heathens used to adorn their houses, their furniture, their cups,
and their seals, the Christians made use of emblems only. Thus, instead
of pretending to make a likeness of our Lord's human form, they made a
figure of a shepherd carrying a lamb on his shoulders, to signify the
Good Shepherd who gave his life for his sheep (_St. John_ x. 11). Other
ornaments of the same kind were--a _dove_, signifying the Holy Ghost; a
_ship_, signifying the Church, the ark of salvation, sailing towards
heaven; a _fish_, which was meant to remind them of their having been
born again in the water, at their baptism; a musical instrument called a
_lyre_, to signify Christian joy; and an _anchor_, the figure of
Christian hope. About the year 300, the Council of Elvira, in Spain,
made a canon forbidding pictures in church, which shows that the
practice had then begun, and was growing; and also that in Spain, at
least, it was thought to be dangerous (as indeed it too surely proved to
be). And a hundred years later, Epiphanius, a famous bishop of Salamis,
in the island of Cyprus, tore a curtain which he found hanging in a
church, with a figure of our Lord, or of some saint, painted on it. He
declared that such things were altogether unlawful, and desired that the
curtain might be used to bury some poor man in, promising to send the
church a plain one instead of it.

Christians used to sign themselves with the sign of the cross on many
occasions, and figures of the cross were early set up in churches. But
crucifixes (which are figures of our Lord on the cross, although
ignorant people sometimes call the cross itself a crucifix) were not
known until hundreds of years after the time of which we are no