or seats (it appears in the first three ranges questionable which were
intended, for they seem too high for the one, and too low and close for
the other), exactly as in an amphitheatre the stairs for access
intersect the sweeping ranges of seats. But in the very rudeness of this
arrangement, and especially in the want of all appliances of comfort
(for the whole is of marble, and the arms of the central throne are not
for convenience, but for distinction, and to separate it more
conspicuously from the undivided seats), there is a dignity which no
furniture of stalls nor carving of canopies ever could attain, and well
worth the contemplation of the Protestant, both as sternly significative
of an episcopal authority which in the early days of the Church was
never disputed, and as dependent for all its impressiveness on the utter
absence of any expression either of pride or self-indulgence.

SECTION XI. But there is one more circumstance which we ought to
remember as giving peculiar significance to the position which the
episcopal throne occupies in this 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 raked 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, from which
they were separated for ever, they should have looked upon each other as
the disciples did when the storm came down on the Tiberias Lake, and
have yielded ready and loving obedience to those who ruled them in His