nstruction and decoration
to any great church, and still add a charm which was hitherto absent.

Strasburg has in all fifteen churches, but the cathedral is possessed of
more and greater glories than all the others combined.

From the days when Strasburg was the Argentoratum of the Romans, the
city has ever been the scene of an activity which has made its
importance known through all the world. It was sacked by Attila and his
Huns in 451, and was completely abandoned up to the seventh century,
when one of the sons of Clovis built it up anew and gave to it the name
of Strateburgum.

Ptolemy is said to be the first writer who mentions Argentoratum, the
ancient Strasburg.

What a bitter blow the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, of which Strasburg was
the gem, was to France can only be realized by a contemplation of the
sentiment which even yet attaches to the event.

That the allied provinces were French in spirit as well as Catholic in
religion is demonstrated by the fact that, at the time of the German
occupation, there was a population of over a million and a half of
souls, of which quite a million and a quarter were of the Roman Catholic
faith. About a million and a quarter were natives of Alsace-Lorraine,
one hundred thousand were Germans, and thirty odd thousand were
foreigners.

The present cathedral was erected on a site that had been consecrated to
religion in very early times. It had been a sacred place in the time of
the Romans, though the deities worshipped were pagan, a temple to
Hercules and Mars having been erected here.

The first Christian church was built, it is believed, in the fifth
century, by St. Amand, then Bishop of Strasburg.

This first church of Strasburg, which was a wooden structure, was
probably founded by Clovis, 504, and reconstructed by Pepin-le-Bref and
Charlemagne. It was mostly destroyed by fire in 873, and in 1002 was
pillaged and fired anew by the soldiers of Duke Hermann, who was
condemned himself to repair the damage. Lightning destroyed it again in
1007, and, by the time the new structure was thought of, nothing but the
crypt of Charlemagne's edifice was visible.

From the proceeds received from Duke Hermann, and contributions from
all Christianity, Bishop Werner conceived a vast scheme of a new church
which in time was completed and consecrated.

This in turn fell before the ravages of fire, and nothing but a mass of
debris remained, from which the present structure was begun i