teaching, one called Realism, the other Nominalism, each of which in turn the Church had been obliged to condemn.  Meanwhile the Prodigal Son is seen feasting with them, and is crowned with flowers, like a new Abelard, singing his songs to Heloise, until his religious capital is exhausted, and he is dragged out of bed, to be driven naked from the house with sticks, in this also I resembling Abelard.  At Bourges he is gently turned out; at Sens he is dragged away by three devils.  Then he seeks service, and is seen knocking acorns from boughs, to feed his employer’s swine; but, among the thousands of young men who must have come here directly from the schools, nine in every ten said that he was teaching letters to his employer’s children or lecturing to the students of the Latin Quarter.  At last he decides to return to his father,—­possibly the Archbishop of Paris or the Abbot of Saint-Denis,—­who receives him with open arms, and gives him a new robe, which to the ribald student would mean a church living—­an abbey, perhaps Saint Gildas-de-Rhuys in Brittany, or elsewhere.  The fatted calf is killed, the feast is begun, and the elder son, whom the malicious student would name Bernard, appears in order to make protest.  Above, God, on His throne, blesses the globe of the world.

The original symbol of the Prodigal Son was a rather different form of prodigality.  According to the Church interpretation, the Father had two sons; the older was the people of the Jews; the younger, the Gentiles.  The Father divided his substance between them, giving to the older the divine law, to the younger, the law of nature.  The younger went off and dissipated his substance, as one must believe, on Aristotle; but repented and returned when the Father sacrificed the victim—­Christ—­as the symbol of reunion.  That the Synagogue also accepts the sacrifice is not so clear; but the Church clung to the idea of converting the Synagogue as a necessary proof of Christ’s divine character.  Not until about the time when this window may have been made, did the new Church, under the influence of Saint Dominic, abandon the Jews and turn in despair to the Gentiles alone.

The old symbolism belonged to the fourth and fifth centuries, and, as told by the Jesuit fathers Martin and Cahier in their “Monograph” of Bourges, it should have pleased the Virgin who was particularly loved by the young, and habitually showed her attachment to them.  At Bourges the window stands next the central chapel of the apse, where at Chartres is the entrance to Saint Piat’s chapel; but Bourges did not belong to Notre Dame, nor did Sens.  The story of the prodigal sons of these years from 1200 to 1230 lends the window a little personal interest that the Prodigal Son of Saint Luke’s Gospel could hardly have had even to thirteenth-century penitents.  Neither the Church nor the Crown loved prodigal sons.  So far from killing fatted calves for them, the bishops in 1209 burned no less than ten in Paris for too great