"And when we consider that not only in the great cities alone, but in
every convent and in every parish, thoughtful men were trying to excel
what had been done and was doing by their predecessors and their
fellows, we shall understand what an amount of thought is built into the
walls of our churches, castles, colleges and dwelling houses. My own
impression is that not one-tenth part of it has been reproduced in all
the works written on the subject up to this day and much of it is
probably lost never again to be recovered for the instruction and
delight of future ages."
The irreparable shattering of the greatest of these monuments of the
past, occurred in our day. The Cathedral of Rheims, the crowning
perfection of architecture having survived "the ravages of wars, the
brutishness of revolutions, the smug complacency of restoration which
had stripped it of its altars, its shrines and its tombs of unnumbered
kings" was the target for two years of German shell and shrapnel and
today it stands gaunt and scathed in a circle of ruin. But even in its
ruin it shows infinite majesty and if it is left as it is,--and may that
be so--for restoration would only vulgarize its incomparable art, Rheims
will stand as a monument both to the thirteenth century which had made
it the supreme type of the Gothic ideal to raise men's souls to God, and
to the twentieth century against whose materialism it was an offence and
a protest.
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