are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of
them," was expanded into the wider promise to many honest and
industrious persons gathered in His name--"They shall be my people and
I will be their God";--deepened in his reading of it, by some lovely
local and simply affectionate faith that Christ, as he was a Jew among
Jews, and a Galilean among Galileans, was also, in His nearness to
any--even the poorest--group of disciples, as one of their nation; and
that their own "Beau Christ d'Amiens" was as true a compatriot to them
as if He had been born of a Picard maiden.

4. It is to be remembered, however--and this is a theological point on
which depended much of the structural development of the northern
basilicas--that the part of the building in which the Divine presence
was believed to be constant, as in the Jewish Holy of Holies, was only
the enclosed choir; in front of which the aisles and transepts might
become the King's Hall of Justice, as in the presence-chamber of Christ;
and whose high altar was guarded always from the surrounding eastern
aisles by a screen of the most finished workmanship; while from those
surrounding aisles branched off a series of radiating chapels or cells,
each dedicated to some separate saint. This conception of the company of
Christ with His saints, (the eastern chapel of all being the Virgin's,)
was at the root of the entire disposition of the apse with its
supporting and dividing buttresses and piers; and the architectural form
can never be well delighted in, unless in some sympathy with the
spiritual imagination out of which it rose. We talk foolishly and
feebly of symbols and types: in old Christian architecture, every part
is _literal_: the cathedral _is_ for its builders the House of God;--it
is surrounded, like an earthly king's, with minor lodgings for the
servants; and the glorious carvings of the exterior walls and interior
wood of the choir, which an English rector would almost instinctively
think of as done for the glorification of the canons, was indeed the
Amienois carpenter's way of making his Master-carpenter
comfortable,[42]--nor less of showing his own native and insuperable
virtue of carpenter, before God and man.

[Footnote 42: The philosophic reader is quite welcome to 'detect' and
'expose' as many carnal motives as he pleases, besides the good
ones,--competition with neighbour Beauvais--comfort to sleepy
heads--solace to fat sides, and the like. He will find at