s not only at the foundation of
all these edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for
example, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holy
book itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could read
the word translated and manifested to the eye, and thus they followed
its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in
its last tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still belonged
to architecture: the arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but
its image was upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a
mummy.

And not only the form of edifices, but the sites selected for them,
revealed the thought which they represented, according as the symbol to
be expressed was graceful or grave. Greece crowned her mountains with
a temple harmonious to the eye; India disembowelled hers, to chisel
therein those monstrous subterranean pagodas, borne up by gigantic rows
of granite elephants.

Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from the
most immemorial pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral of Cologne,
architecture was the great handwriting of the human race. And this is so
true, that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought, has
its page and its monument in that immense book.

All civilization begins in theocracy and ends in democracy. This law of
liberty following unity is written in architecture. For, let us insist
upon this point, masonry must not be thought to be powerful only in
erecting the temple and in expressing the myth and sacerdotal symbolism;
in inscribing in hieroglyphs upon its pages of stone the mysterious
tables of the law. If it were thus,--as there comes in all human society
a moment when the sacred symbol is worn out and becomes obliterated
under freedom of thought, when man escapes from the priest, when
the excrescence of philosophies and systems devour the face of
religion,--architecture could not reproduce this new state of human
thought; its leaves, so crowded on the face, would be empty on the back;
its work would be mutilated; its book would be incomplete. But no.

Let us take as an example the Middle Ages, where we see more clearly
because it is nearer to us. During its first period, while theocracy is
organizing Europe, while the Vatican is rallying and reclassing about
itself the elements of a Rome made from the Rome which lies in ruins
around the Capitol, while Christianity