When Saint Martin put his rude followers to work building houses for their new faith he must have established a certain amount of unity and order among them. Could there have been a better way to attach his crude converts to their Church than to induce them to work upon it?

While Saint Martin was building at Tours, the Dark Ages were setting in, when men of action became marauders, preying upon others; men of thought became monks, praying for themselves; humanity went backwards, and history ceased from very shame. But through it all there were a few perplexed old bishops who, whatever their failings may have been, tried to do something for their fellows. However, in that lawless day, they had to defend rather than expand Christianity, and even protect its churches, for pagans, too, might be honest iconoclasts!

The best thing the Dark Ages did for civilization was to learn the builders’ trade and teach it to a great many people. It was a general service, for to make a people industrious is, sooner or later, to make them skilful and law-abiding.

It is curious that Saint Martin who, even while he was a bishop, lodged in a hut covered with boughs, should head the great line of builders who jointly and severally developed French Gothic. In standing for the integrity of the relic, which was literally the seed of early Christian art, Saint Martin gave a new and a higher impetus to life, and with it, very indirectly, to art. Seventy years after Martin’s death, to his blessed memory Saint Perpetuas built “the most beautiful church in existence,” at least so Gregory of Tours affirms. We will not inquire on what lines, for this was at the beginning of the Dark Ages, when nothing beautiful was made.

A supreme recognition of the bold old iconoclast comes to us from devotees of the classic; from certain artists and connoisseurs of the Renaissance. This unexpected tribute to iconoclasm is published upon a monument far removed from old Gaul in time and place, in ideal and execution.

In a monastery dowered with the gold of two reigning dynasties of tyrants, dowered by the genius of two reigning dynasties of painters and sculptors, amid surroundings perhaps the richest in the world, where fifty monks might dream away their lives in silence, in that lordly and exclusive playhouse for the soul of the Renaissance, wherein the exuberance of the Gothic takes on the maturity of the Renaissance in an elaboration which for once does not cloy,—in the Certosa di Pavia we find a tribute to crude, old Saint Martin, the iconoclast.

On a mural of one of the side chapels of this Certosa behold him represented in the garb of a fifteenth century monk, with his sanctity emphasized by a large, glittering nimbus, to which the aerial perspective of the otherwise maturely realistic painting is deliberately sacrificed, calmly superintending a gilded youth of the Renaissance while he smashes a fine Grecian statue! How did this rude act find endorsement in a temple of art? How did the coarsest of the saints win a place in the heart of the Renaissance? Was it because in him they saw a reflection of the subtlest honesty of Art, that god of the Renaissance? Was it because, above all else, Saint Martin especially stood for the integrity of the ideal?

Though this little scene on the chapel wall may have been simply historic in its import, nothing is plainer than that the picture is intended to honor an uncompromising bishop of the early Church.

Through the confusion that disintegrated empire, Saint Martin was a rude standard-bearer of two ideals broad enough to rebuild nations—Sincerity and Brotherhood. “First he wrought and after that he taught”—and first the spirit of his teaching was put into rude pictures, because in Gaul so few people could read and still fewer could condense an idea into forceful words.

It was long, long after an angel had appeared and carried Saint Martin’s soul in the form of a child straight to God, as a gentle old writer attests, that a modern geologist voiced the fundamental idea of the best beloved saint of old Gaul, “An honest god is the noblest work of man.”

But the past, as well as the present, has its peculiar eloquence wherewith to honor the dead. Over one of the oldest Christian altars spared to us by time, in solemn, enduring mosaic, big and simple, stands Saint Martin leading a line of saints to Christ. And this great hieratic on the wall of an old church of old Ravenna describes, as no language of the present may, an early builder of the great mystic Church which “rests upon the brawny trunks of heroes ... whose spans and arches are the joined hands of comrades ... and whose heights and spaces are inscribed by the numberless musings of all the dreamers of the world.”

Late in the fifth century, while the confusion of the Dark Ages reigned supreme, the Christian bishop of the Remi was at work on the discouraging task of rebuilding his church after pagan depredations at Rheims, when the great joy was vouchsafed to him of baptizing Clovis, the ruler of the largest Teutonic State of the age.

Saint Remi recommended Clovis to adore that which he had burned and to burn that which he had adored, that the work of judicious destruction might continue. Clovis sent offerings to all the sanctuaries, particularly to that of the old soldier Saint Martin. Three thousand Franks were baptized; Clovis exchanged the three toads on his shield for the fleur-de-lis, and France became Christian toute de suite. Then Saint Remi dreamt of great things yet to come: of a king and a people governed by the Church of Christ, temporally and spiritually. And he interpreted this dream to the people by a charming symbol: he explained how the Holy Ghost, the Heavenly Dove, had brought from above some spiritual oil with which to anoint Clovis at his baptism. But to make the idea clear to these many men of childish minds and many patois, he showed them a little ampulla filled with oil, which, he explained, “the Dove” had brought to him from Heaven to grace the baptism of their chief. And they decided to keep the oil that was left in the ampulla for great occasions, like coronations. This wonderful ointment united the Crown and the Church as long as it lasted. During the Revolution a sansculotte shattered the old vessel. Orthodoxy claimed to have caught one drop and encased it in a beautiful new vase; it was used again, but its efficacy was no more. And not long thereafter the French people decided to do without coronations, or monasteries, but they still love Clovis and Saint Remi.

Civilization is much indebted to the early bishops and a goodly number of them have been canonized. The monastic clergy were the snobs of the Church, securely selfish in the magnificent fastnesses they erected for themselves in the skies; condescending comfortably to pray for those that fed them (though who knows but they even shirked that obligation), while the secular clergy were working out, amid inspiration and error, the foundations of a Christian civilization. The idea of the early bishops that the Church ought to rule the world was a natural and an honest mistake. The later bishops were quite a different class. The stout little church of Saint Remi near Rheims pleads still for its brave old bishop, though as a building it is eclipsed by the great cathedral of the city.

The dynasty of Clovis passed away and the next reigning house came in with Pepin. He had good reason to approve of the Church as an institution, for it had early played into his hand. Had not the Abbé of Saint Denis journeyed to Rome to secure the papal confirmation of his crown? And had not Pope Stephen, while enjoying the protection of that same abbey, anointed Charlemagne, his little son? On this was based the succession. With his own good sword Charlemagne defended it and brought a semblance of order to the land of the Gaul and the Frank; and, genius that he was, he anticipated, in his interest in architecture, the genius of his great people. But it was rather Charlemagne’s attitude toward church building and letters that told, in the long run, than any literal achievement in them during this time. However, from the reign of his youngest son, Louis the Pious, we may trace the steady, consistent growth of an original order of building which culminated in the unparalleled Gothic of Northern France.

By that time the nobility had built so many sanctuaries in their domains that they had to be interdicted from establishing useless private foundations and, in a more democratic spirit, sixteen or seventeen churches, all edifices of dignity, were begun. Then Bishop Ebbon saw a golden opportunity to build a magnificent cathedral on the long-hallowed soil of Rheims. There the Druid had raised his altar, there the Roman his temple, which may have absorbed the old Druid’s stones into its walls as it had his old gods into its adaptive bosom, to fall, in its turn, a mightier pile, from which the Christian built again and again as he grew in skill. Indeed, beyond their generation the people of Rheims were experienced builders. In addition to all the stone quarried by varied worshipers of the long past at Rheims, Louis the Pious put at Ebbon’s service the materials of the city wall and sent him his favorite architect—Rumald. And it was found that the new cathedral protected the city better than the old walls. La paix religieuse turned away many an invader. One golden cup from the altar bought off the Norsemen (not that it turned their hearts); they swooped down upon Chartres instead.

The old chroniclers assure us that this early Cathedral of Rheims was the finest in the realm. It must have beggared description, for what manner of building it was none of them seem to say. But they tell of its wonderful altar of Our Lady, covered with gold and studded with gems, upon which stood a glorious virgin made of solid gold. That impressed them. Was this altar built with the loot of war? Was it built in remorse, or, worse, in mercenary superstition? Or was it lavished like the woman’s precious ointment upon our Savior? This much it certainly was,—a united tribute of the material to the immaterial, coming from many men of many minds.

It was about this time that the Virgin became so peculiarly near and dear to the Catholic world. They loaded her with jewels and appealed to her as one of themselves, human, though divinely so. They painted her on the inside of their jewel boxes that she might turn the heart of the thief; they appealed to her in embarrassing human situations and loved her as a helpful, pitying woman who brought religion home to them.

In due time this golden Virgin of Rheims, so imposing, so splendid to her rude worshipers, gently made way for a line of tenderer virgins who were gradually infusing sweetness and skill into those who sought to spiritualize wood and stone into a suggestion of the mother of Christ. When the old ninth century church at Rheims was burned it is supposed that the barbarians’ gold was minted to rebuild the cathedral. Or shall we say that, purified by fire, the golden Virgin arose again and again from her ashes to rebuild her shrine in maturer beauty?

After many fires, in 1212 the present Cathedral of Rheims was commenced upon the old, old crypt; before the middle of the century the main body of the church was complete, and once again the Cathedral of Rheims was the finest in the realm! In 1903 a vote was taken for the noblest Gothic monument, and the returns, as always before, were, “the Cathedral of Rheims.”

Through the Dark Ages the people of Rheims had not built in vain. Effort after effort was destroyed, it is true, but like the golden virgin it was minted to rebuild anew.

Lacking the mathematical knowledge, which is the mainstay of the modern architect, these early builders must have learned empirically, that is, in the school of defeat—but, too, there are triumphs there. Did the idea of the beautiful flying buttress (which is simply a constructive device to strengthen walls pierced by enormous windows) come suddenly to some baffled old architect, as from the lips of an angel, in answer to work and prayer? These old builders of Rheims leave us no written word, but there is a great Florentine architect who is a little more communicative; he leaves a discreet hint or two of his method of reasoning and also of securing contracts. Regarding the construction of the projected dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, which the public regarded as impracticable, Brunelleschi writes: “Yet, remembering that this is a temple consecrated to God and the Virgin, I confidently trust that for a work executed in their honor, they will not fail to infuse knowledge where it is wanting and will bestow strength, wisdom and genius on him who shall be the author of such a project. But how can I help you, seeing that the work is not mine? I tell you plainly that, if it belonged to me, my courage and power would, beyond all doubt, suffice to discover means whereby the work might be effected without so many difficulties, but as yet I have not reflected on the matter to any extent.” And when he got the contract and reflected, he turned to the “parent past”—he went to Rome, where the vaulting of the Parthenon taught him to vault that lovelier Florentine dome which “clasps the ancient to the modern world.”

The builders of the Gothic were in some ways more original than the builders of the Renaissance; they evolved their own bracing; thus gradually at Rheims, the “Athens of the Middle Ages,” a great cathedral grew up that ranks with the Parthenon.

The Greek had the subtlest of languages in which to speak of the good and the beautiful, while where the greatest Gothic churches were designed there was only a corrupt dead language and a partially developed living one; but the subtle poets of Chartres, Rheims, Amiens, Rouen, Bourges and Laon built strongly into their cathedrals the sweetest things they had to say. When the Parthenon was constructed Athens was so wealthy that it was one of the glories of Pericles that he was able to spend so much so well upon the greatest capital in the world. Rheims was simply, as the Middle Ages went, a rich see, and the Middle Ages were wretchedly poor, yet her cathedral is the more elaborate building of the two. To the end of time it is a monument of civic and religious enthusiasm; and, as we seek the human story, so elusively suggested through the marvelous pile, we realize at least how great a thing it is for each worker to give, in perfect self-effacement, of his best. The decorations of the mighty temple are so exquisitely subservient to the great whole that the handiwork of the gifted imagier, with that of his weaker brother, the one serving as a foil to the other, holds together like their prayers in the noble harmony of the great church. Gothic sculpture is for all sorts and conditions of men, but least of all for artists. It speaks its simple lesson distinctly. It is not sculpture for sculpture’s sake, but rather for decoration and lyric expression. Its emaciated saint betokens sacrifice; literally and figuratively he fills his place in the long, narrow niche, annihilating himself for the great church as a Catholic priest should.

Would you know how the Gothic affects a sculptor?

Says August Rodin: “Life is made up of strength and grace; the Gothic gives us this; its influence has entered into my blood and grown into my being.”

Nowadays, when all “the world travels,” schools of art do not grow up in little communities; intellectual boundaries are in no way geographic, and the moral effect of one man on another is hidden from view. But on the walls of the old mediæval churches a simpler people, as their work improved, show their direct obligations to one another.

The Gothic cathedrals which served as Bibles for the laity (who, as a rule, could not read print) are now the most veracious chronicles of the period that we possess. Their statements cannot be gainsaid, however variously they may be understood. If some of the last judgments sculptured on their walls, with half of the figures marching toward heaven and the other half (very similar in appearance) moving serenely toward hell, are rather too didactic for this age of doubt, between the lines of these great stone volumes a gentle reader finds countless beautiful stories, much more convincingly told, of artists and artisans working away with smiles on their faces, carving Bible stories under the direction of the clergy; devising figures to personify the virtues and vices; inserting little angels here and there to fill out the design, while the best artist is rewarded with the sweet honor of carving the Madonna.

The barbarian’s gold pays interest yet; the spirit of the bequest is not changed;—a united tribute of the material to the spiritual coming from many men of many minds. The old golden Madonna is patroness still of the five thousand statues of the Cathedral of Rheims, whose mute lips speak so various a language. They tell of a day that is dead and of a day that is eternal; they speak of substance and of spirit; of error and of intuition; of things human and of things divine. Indeed,

Early in the twelfth century, within the hospitable walls of the old Abbey of Saint Denis, a prince and a charity child grew up together; there a love, almost romantic, developed between them. When the prince became king and embarked upon a crusade he left the reins of government in the hands of his old comrade, who in the meantime had become the Abbé of Saint Denis and was, incidentally, one of the cleverest of politicians. Suger paid the royal debts (democratic good pay seems to have been an ideal with him), and called the realm to order so successfully that statesmen came from afar to study his very novel methods, for the crusades had set the people traveling. On his return the king graciously greeted his regent as “father of his country.” Suger, not to be outdone, instituted a somewhat legendary liturgy to be celebrated annually at Saint Denis commemorating the merits of Louis the Lusty (or Louis the Fat, as we call him).

Was this liturgy so different from the campaign songs we sing now? It was really more called for, since enthusiasm over the royal person is one of the legitimate tools of monarchy, and Louis VI is an early monarch who deserves credit for abetting the gradual advance of France from a feudality to a veritable kingdom.

Suger, individually, did not stand too greatly in awe of royalty, for he peremptorily ordered Louis VII to come back from the “Holy Wars” to attend to his mundane duties, and be it credited to that monarch that he graciously obeyed the old friend of his father.

Suger is the most interesting personality that comes down to us from France of the twelfth century. Though a few characteristic anecdotes are told of him, we know him most intimately as the builder of Saint Denis and the far-seeing friend of the arts and crafts. It was said that he was a good goldsmith, and his sympathy with skilled labor lends color to the statement; but however hazy our other impressions of Suger may be, we know how he loved the old Abbey of Saint Denis—“sa mère et sa nourrice.” As a churchman he loved the blessed spot to which the angels had escorted brave old Saint Denis, when, after his martyrdom, he picked up his head and walked along with them unto the place “where he now resteth by his election and the puveance of God. And there was heard so grete and swete a melody of angels that many that heard it byleuyd in oure lorde.” He loved the old building that Dagobert, the Robin Hood of French monarchs, had built so royally, almost five hundred years before his day, for the poor and lowly, and for which the pleasant Saint Eloi, patron of goldsmiths, singing as he worked, had made the wondrously beautiful old reliquary; and as a man of literary feeling, he loved the old Abbey as his Alma Mater. But the diocese had grown, and on festal days so pressing were the crowds who would touch the holy relics of Saint Denis that good people were continually being trodden underfoot by eager and other worldly worshipers. So Suger decided to enlarge the church. He did not touch the dear old choir of Saint Denis: that was consecrated to God and, too, it was tenderly hallowed to man by many human associations; but he decided to add to it a great nave.

Of course at first the crowds vigorously abetted him, humbly harnessing themselves together like beasts of burden to draw the stone from the quarry. The trumpet sounded; banners were unfurled, and the procession marched; except for the murmur of those who confessed their sins to God, silence reigned. When the concourse arrived at the holy site, the multitude burst forth into a song of praise. Their sins once disposed of, the ardor of the multitude may have flagged, for we read of the busy little Abbé leaving the cares of state to go himself to the forests in search of the big timber others had not the enthusiasm to find.

That the very earth might pay its tribute to the blessed martyr, Suger studded the new golden screen in front of the tomb of Saint Denis with gems from “every land of the world,” and then the little old Abbé conceived of a still higher tribute: he gathered skill from “every country in the world” (his world was small, it is true); he gave to these skilled craftsmen the honor of working on “the Church, his Mother”; besides, they taught in the layman’s school of architecture, which he established in the yard of the old abbey.

To the amazement of the world, in that day of serfdom, Suger voluntarily paid his workmen and paid them by the week; and with the force and intensity that was in him, he advanced architecture as much in the ten years he was rebuilding Saint Denis as others had done in a hundred. The influence of his school of architecture still lives. It was one of our earliest instances of systematic training for the laity, and those who would trace the Italian Renaissance to French and classic sources, attach especial importance to the imagiers of Saint Denis.

An immense number of statues, varying greatly in excellence, were made during the Middle Ages to decorate the churches. In our meagre records of the period, we even come across instances of peasants traveling far and spending their all to secure an especially beautiful Madonna, and we are assured of miraculous rewards, spiritual and temporal, coming to them from it. Actually, through the enthusiasm and liberality of these rude people, miracles of art have wrought their magical effect upon the imagination of generations and generations of men. These imagiers became so numerous that they formed a powerful guild in which a race of sculptors was born and bred. While Sculpture was merely the hand-maiden and scribe of Architecture, her craftsmen were called imagiers. But the imagiers became so expert that in the seventeenth century the French Academy changed the name of their order to the “Sculptor’s Guild.”

That the imagier loved the cathedral which he was dowering with what talent he possessed is most likely; for, added to the simple conscientiousness, alike in all ages, of the worker who loves his craft and respects himself, was the intensity of the Age of Faith.

Gothic art may have been lived more generally even than Grecian, for it was the only intellectual outlet of its age. Much of its symbolism is now a dead language. We guess at the meaning of the gargoyles and grotesques, and draw liberal interpretations from the lips of the smiling angels who spoke more familiarly to a childish people; but when we count the decorative kings and bishops ranged in rows upon the grand façades, their supremacy over the souls, bodies and estates of men, of which we know so well, seems the myth of myths. However, we can read some of the old carvings, which had nothing in particular to say at the time they were made, like a book. Hybrid designs on pillars, capitals and cornices speak of the chivalrous meeting of the east and the west on the broad field of art. They bring up pictures of the rude crusaders overpowered by their first view of oriental elaboration, and we smile to see how it set them imitating, or, better still, adapting, and how the arts of war may bring about the arts of peace; for, in the fulness of time, those who strive, achieve, if not for themselves and their cause, for others and perhaps for a better cause.

Another art made great strides during the rebuilding of Saint Denis,—the glass-maker’s. We read about Vitrearii as far back as Charlemagne’s time. The windows they made were glass mosaics, held together with lead instead of stucco, forming little gem-like pictures above the holy altars, which told sacred stories beautifully, for in this way many scenes could be connected on one window; besides, color, like music, takes the emotions captive. One must examine a statue to realize it, but, in the phrase of the studio, color “sings.” A childish old chronicler relates that the retainers of Godfrey of Bouillon were obliged almost to tear him away from the churches, so absorbed was he in gazing on the windows. Was it through beautiful windows that the mystic aspiration of the mute minor poets of the cloister was finally reflected upon the man of action who took the first step, all unconsciously, toward the deliverance of his age from its dark, narrow bondage?

As a soldier, Godfrey de Bouillon had answered the call of the pilgrims who demanded protection; as a soldier, he had kept the peace (when there was any to keep). He was the one early crusader of whom we have record, who seems to have had the slightest idea of the fitness of things; indeed, in feeling, he was as truly a poet as a soldier. “So, day after day, in silence and in peace, with equal measure and just sale, did the Duke and the people pass through the realms of Hungary,” writes an astonished old chronicler, for Godfrey de Bouillon had paid the way of his army to the Holy City—an unheard of idea in warfare! How quixotic he must have seemed!

Language has changed since those windows spoke to Godfrey of Bouillon. But when a general stops on his line of march for higher council and then steers so true through the darkest day toward a faint, far-distant light, must he not have seen through the glass darkly?

It was but a few years after this “parfit gentil” knight passed away before he was as dear a hero of romance as King Arthur had become after many centuries, so little was there in his life for men to forget, so much that was sweet to dream upon. I suppose his story must have been related many times in beautiful glass, though as the panes grew larger and finer they told their stories less personally; but gallant knights on windows far and near are still reflecting an ideal that came to the First Baron of Jerusalem through the old church’s windows. Might it not be said of these old church builders, who builds from the heart feeds three: himself, his hungry neighbor, and Me?

To make windows like those of Saint Denis, an orderly, organized factory was necessary, and organization was the crying need of that age. Another astonished old chronicler repeats, that in those days of serfdom Suger paid his glass-workers. But the men learned their rights more readily than the chroniclers. Thereafter we constantly run upon the records of powerful workmen’s unions or guilds. In fact, we read of them later on the glass itself. These splendid church windows were, of course, very costly, and then, as now, they were usually presented to the churches. We find the guilds are the proud donors of many of them; two fine old church windows come down to us proudly representing some imagiers and glass-makers at their work, those guilds having thus elected to “with the angels stand.”

Complaints of the luxury of the church also come down. Saint Bernard declares “their stones were gilded with the money of the needy and wretched to charm the eyes of the rich” (but had the poor no eyes?). Being against the government by temperament, Saint Bernard especially abominated the royal Abbey of Saint Denis. He complained of the “unclean apes and befowled tigers” upon which Suger’s imagiers developed their skill, and it is written (how the writer arrived at the scene he does not explain) that as Suger’s confessor, Bernard commanded him to divest his mind of mundane cares and to dream only of the heavenly Jerusalem.

But the world weighed on Suger as long as he remained in it: his dream was of two splendid powers, England and France, separated, but living in peace! Suger was not in favor of crusades. He was the one ecclesiastic who would subject the clergy as well as the laity to royal authority, rendering unto Cæsar that which was Cæsar’s. Though a priest, in his political methods Suger was a broad, true and practical patriot, and if, unlike Saint Bernard, he was not adapted for canonization, he was a hero to his private secretary and to his king; and he still is a hero to the modern student of architecture, or of economics.

Into the very walls of his big and simple old church the “little old Abbé” built his big and simple sermon. It read: “Let us have good, honest, beautiful work, doing honor alike to God and man. Let us train our craftsmen, pay them and respect them.”

Though Saint Denis may lack the mystical beauty of the best Gothic, so noble and satisfactory is its design that the nineteenth century could do no better than to restore it.

Though Suger’s economics were very simple, the twentieth century has found no better platform: “Pay your workmen voluntarily, and summon all, from the king down, into their respective fields of labor; only when they all respond, we shall have a lovelier church than the old Abbey of Saint Denis.”

The Episcopal Church recognizes three distinct divisions: the High Church, or mystical element that, words failing, would speak by symbols; the Low Church, that would say what it means and mean what it says; and the Broad Church, that would set aside details and seek in religion a general harmony.

Though they are not so formally defined, these same divisions, being based on human temperaments, exist in other sects so literally that the same symbols have met with the identical adoption and objection. About 205, Tertullian ridiculed the use of candles on the altars of the early church, and Lactance took up the subject some hundred years later. Thereafter Saint Jerome laid these still troublesome candles at the door of the laity, especially of the women. However, the symbol and the women conquered.

In this desultory search of ours for hints of the social history of the old French cathedral builders, we meet with the high and low church elements which seem, though this idea may be fanciful, to have influenced the appearance even of their respective churches. There is the grandly simple and direct architecture, the Cathedral of Laon, which inclined to Low Church, allowing its votaries considerable latitude, and the symbolically ornate cathedral at Chartres, which from remote ages has been a noted shrine of mysticism. Its site was holy ground to the early Christian and perhaps to the Druids before him. Tradition has it that even to them on this hallowed spot came a prophecy of the Messiah. (If it did, it probably came from some Jewish source in the days of the Romans.)

There is a charming story, more than legend, if less than history, of “Notre Dame Sous Terre” of Chartres. While most of the early Christians, in a spirit of hatred, were destroying false gods and their shrines, some pioneers of Christianity found in a grotto at Chartres a figure which had been worshiped by the Druids, resembling their own Madonna, whereby, to these gentle priests, she seemed doubly hallowed. Accepting her grotto as already consecrate, they located their high altar there, upon it reinstated the old Madonna of the Druids, and in a humble spirit, along with their simple converts, they bowed down before her, for upon them had descended that sovereign reverence which appreciates another man’s god.

From the time this old druidic figure was raised upon a Christian altar to this day, first honors have been accorded to her shrine. Before her or her representative have bowed, weary and footsore, every one of the French kings, from Clovis to Louis XV, as well as innumerable other pilgrims, rich or poor, gathered from every land of Christendom by the democracy of the church.

Even the revolutionists recognized this “First Lady of Chartres,” for while they lumped other relics together in general destruction they paid Notre Dame Sous Terre the back-handed compliment of a special bonfire at the cathedral door.

The sansculottes have passed away without individual record, but a charmingly carved representative of the old Notre Dame Sous Terre still occupies the most venerated shrine of Chartres; while its old-time spirit of church hospitality yet pervades the noble cathedral that has developed above her grotto, her clergy still smile kindly upon the pilgrim and the stranger, even though his interest in their church be solely artistic. They seem to say: “Take from our old cathedral what you may, surely her beauty is pure and holy.”

True religious art can but lead to some phase of piety, as August Rodin declares that all true art must. It may be but a chance title; however, the latest book on French Gothic speaks of “Chartres, the House of Prayer”; but certainly the feeling which has been lavished on this spot, the passionate generosity of devotees through long ages, has brought forth one of the most sacredly beautiful churches in the world.

Now let us investigate literally the claims of Notre Dame Sous Terre. Recent excavations prove that the present Cathedral of Chartres is built over a grotto, where the Druids probably held their services. In excavating under and around the choir of the cathedral, vestiges of ancient altars and idols were unearthed which prove conclusively that the symbols of the heathen were not cleared away violently. The policy of Rome tended toward religious tolerance; the gods of the Romans often mixed peaceably in the temples with the gods of the people Rome conquered, hence the cult of the Virgin might have existed along with that of the pagan gods.

In the early days of Christianity the Virgin was not given the prominence she acquired after the eighth century; this figure known as the druidic Madonna may even have represented some sweet, motherly goddess of another name. Symbols are elastic, therein lies their supreme value; they may be all things to all men. Words always have brought division to the church; symbols, unity. The wisest and kindest of the early bishops had the most grace in translating the old symbols of their converts into the picturesque language of their new church. For instance, Gregory the Great changed the pagan memorial custom of putting food on graves on a certain fête-day to bringing flowers for the graves and praying for the dead on All Souls Day. The early Christian missionaries at Chartres may have believed this figure to be a Madonna or they may have translated it into one. Indeed, it is not the genuineness of the figure itself that is the point of this story; it is the attitude of the Chartrians toward it.

From the character of the Gallo-Romaine substructure of the Chapel of Saint Lubin in the crypt of Chartres, the list of the early bishops of that diocese and the general history of the evangelization of Gaul, it is inferred that ever since the beginning of the fourth century a bishop’s church has stood on the site of the present cathedral. Mingled with all the superstition of its age there was a certain tolerant broad-church element maintained at Chartres from the first. Perhaps that made the church so peculiarly dear to the people of France, for though the French kings were crowned at Rheims and buried at Saint Denis, Chartres seems the most intimately associated with their lives. It is written that after his conversion Clovis stopped there for further instruction, and Gibbon observes his measures were sometimes moderated by the milder genius of Rome and Christianity. The Carlovingian kings were very partial to Chartres. Charles the Bald, who comes down to us familiarly as a church builder through an old picture in which he holds a cast of a cathedral in his hand, conferred the most precious of relics upon Chartres—the Sancta Camisia of the Virgin! Robert the Pious contributed a sapphire. Within her mystic walls sensible Louis the Fat pardoned his enemies; there Philippe le Bel, Charles le Bel and Philippe de Valois gave thanks for their victories, childishly presenting their armor and their beloved war-horses to this Church, their Mother. Saint Louis marched barefooted about twenty-one miles to endow Chartres with her beautiful Portail Septentrionale. And when Henry IV changed his religion, let us believe with the really good intention of bringing about a little peace on earth to Frenchmen, he elected to be consecrated at Chartres, “by reason of the peculiar devotion of his ancestors, the Dukes of Vendome, to the old cathedral, the most ancient in Christendom.” There were reasons why he could not conveniently have been crowned at Rheims like other French kings, that city being hostile to him. But Henry IV always had a clever and sufficient answer.

To return to the material story of the old bishops’ church near the well of Saint Lubin, our first dated record takes us back into a feudal war. In 743, Hanald duc d’Aquitaine, fighting the Comte de Chartres, burned the town cathedral; but when he realized what he had done he retired to a monastery to do penance all the rest of his days. Was it in superstition? Was it in true repentance? Did he burn the church by accident? That might have been. The simple piety of the Dark Ages that would build “The House of God” for all time rendered the churches the strongest of buildings, and defensive armies often resorted to them; then, too, there were spiritual objections to attacking a church. This factor was sometimes over-estimated.

The Cathedral of Chartres was rebuilt, only to be burned down one hundred and fifteen years after by the Normans. During this siege the non-combatants of the town confidently took refuge in the cathedral with their bishop instead of buying off the pirates with gold from the Holy Altar as the people of Rheims had done (they are all gone now and God knows which did best). Unexpectedly, neither church nor bishop impressed the Normans, who overturned the city walls, burned the buildings, massacred the bishop, and every one else who came in their way; but after the Normans left, the Chartrians had the cold comfort of gathering their dead and laying them away beside the Well of Saint Lubin and “through the merits of those there reposing a crowd of miracles were wrought.” About this period the disease we now know as erysipelas came to be highly respected. In France it was called le mal des ardents; in England, the “sacred fire”; for, one thousand years ago processions like those that now visit Lourdes were pressing on to Chartres to drink of the holy spring. The world moves, but somewhat in a groove. At this Lourdes of the Dark Ages the afflicted were tended by nuns, but we find a certain telltale regulation:—after nine days (ample time for blood poisoning to develop unmistakably) the sick must go home, “cured or not.”

Was medical practice then so much worse than ours during the Rebellion, when old rags of the nation were collected and all sorts and conditions of women scraped them into lint full of germs for the wounded soldiers? But if the church was a crazy physician, she was a gentle nurse. She established a chivalry toward the sick that no Cervantes would laugh away. It lives in medical ethics, and the quixotic obligation of the doctor to leave no stone unturned for his patient has been the foundation of medical science. Some of the old Hotels-Dieu of blessed name and memory have developed into up-to-date hospitals and medical schools, like Charing Cross Hospital, London, which still enjoys its mediæval benefice, while modern hospitals, in general, are moral descendants of the old ideal.

Again the old Church of Chartres was rebuilt, again to stand for a little over a century. This building had the satisfaction (may we not use the figure, for the mediæval church was very human) of seeing the Normans, under Rollo, defeated by an army marching under its blessed standard, the Sancta Camisia of the Virgin borne aloft as a banner. But later, Rollo married the daughter of Charles the Simple, settled down in Normandy, presented his castle to the see of the Bishop of Chartres and adopted the Christian religion. A double victory for the church! Many of the first Norman converts were baptized a dozen times, for the sake of excitement or for the white garment given them at the ceremony. Thereafter the funeral of Rollo was rendered doubly memorable by the slaughter of one hundred captives and rich gifts to the monasteries.

In spite of the Sancta Camisia, in spite of all the remains of all of the martyrs that had been aggregating in the martyrium under the church for seven hundred years, in 962 Richard of Normandy burned the cathedral with the town. But the relics had not been powerless, for this was the last pagan outbreak. The church had the holy triumph of Christianizing her adversaries, and the martyrium, between the excellence of its building material, the water of the spring of Saint Lubin near by, and “the merits of those there reposing,” remained intact and was found in the excavations of 1901; but the spring is gone; it was probably diverted by the foundations of the present cathedral.

Though a paralyzing conviction had come upon the people, Bishop Vulpard immediately started to rebuild. It had somehow been very generally decided that the world would come to an end in the year 1000, so near at hand.

How did this private information regarding the future affect the multitude? They probably took it riotously,—at least, such has been the experience in times of plague and horror, when it seemed that the race was about to be wiped out. Indeed, it is only for others that the saner, better life is led—best of all, unconsciously led.