thrust of the vaults, telling the unsatisfied, incomplete, overstrained effort of man to rival the energy, intelligence, and purpose of God.  Thomas Aquinas and the schoolmen tried to put it in words, but their Church is another chapter.  In act, all man’s work ends there;—­mathematics, physics, chemistry, dynamics, optics, every sort of machinery science may invent,—­to this favour come at last, as religion and philosophy did before science was born.  All that the centuries can do is to express the idea differently:—­a miracle or a dynamo; a dome or a coal-pit; a cathedral or a world’s fair; and sometimes to confuse the two expressions together.  The world’s fair tends more and more vigorously to express the thought of infinite energy; the great cathedrals of the Middle Ages always reflected the industries and interests of a world’s fair.  Chartres showed it less than Laon or Paris, for Chartres was never a manufacturing town, but a shrine, such as Lourdes, where the Virgin was known to have done miracles, and had been seen in person; but still the shrine turned itself into a market and created valuable industries.  Indeed, this was the chief objection which Saint Paul made to Ephesus and Saint Bernard to the cathedrals.  They were in some ways more industrial than religious.  The mere masonry and structure made a vast market for labour; the fixed metalwork and woodwork were another; but the decoration was by far the greatest.  The wood-carving, the glass windows, the sculpture, inside and out, were done mostly in workshops on the spot, but besides these fixed objects, precious works of the highest perfection filled the church treasuries.  Their money value was great then; it is greater now.  No world’s fair is likely to do better to-day.  After five hundred years of spoliation, these objects fill museums still, and are bought with avidity at every auction, at prices continually rising and quality steadily falling, until a bit of twelfth-century glass would be a trouvaille like an emerald; a tapestry earlier than 1600 is not for mere tourists to hope; an enamel, a missal, a crystal, a cup, an embroidery of the Middle Ages belongs only to our betters, and almost invariably, if not to the State, to the rich Jews, whose instinctive taste has seized the whole field of art which rested on their degradation.  Royalty and feudality spent their money rather on arms and clothes.  The Church alone was universal patron, and the Virgin was the dictator of taste.

With the Virgin’s taste, during her regency, critics never find fault.  One cannot know its whole magnificence, but one can accept it as a matter of faith and trust, as one accepts all her other miracles without cavilling over small details of fact.  The period of eighteenth-century scepticism about such matters and the bourgeois taste of Voltaire and Diderot have long since passed, with the advent of a scientific taste still more miraculous; the whole world of the Virgin’s art, catalogued in the