THE CITY OF GOD 113 Christians who had any education had a classical one, be- cause that was the only one to be had. The early Christians did not excel in art and literature, as the lack of literary style in the Greek New Testament and the rude frescoes of the Roman catacombs show. Often Christian artists took statues of Apollo or Mithraic monuments and used them with slight modifications for Christian personalities and Biblical scenes. For their church services they adopted, not the classical temple, but a style of building sufficiently similar to the Roman forensic basilica to be called by the same name — a rectangular structure with a central nave higher in the roof than the two side aisles which paralleled it and which were separated from it by colonnades or arcades. At one end was added to the rectangle a semicircular recess for the altar, and the interior unless small was covered with a flat wooden roof. Gradually the Christians came to express their new faith in hymns differing in both form and spirit from classical verse, while Lives of the saints took the place of epics and romances. Symbolism in art and allegory in literature were important Christian characteristics, the mysteries of the faith being told in parable or veiled in sign and symbol. The voluminous Christian writers of the closing centuries of the Empire, like Jerome and Augustine and Basil and Ambrose, are called "church fathers" because Church fa- of their influence upon the thought and usage of patristic^ the Church then and since. Jerome besides his literature. own works made the Latin translation of the Bible, called the Vulgate, which is still used by the Roman Catholic Church. The name, "church father," is indeed applied to all early Christian writers, including, after the Roman Empire had fallen, many like Gregory the Great, and the term "patristic literature" is used to cover their writings. Augustine once said, "The authority of Scripture is higher than all the efforts of the human intelligence." This was a hard saying for experimental science or rational philosophy, but represents fairly well the attitude of patristic literature, which is based largely on the Bible and is concerned chiefly
