e
investigates the Middle Ages by levelling down the divine idea to the
lowest earthly meaning, and referring to man what is intended to apply
to God. The prayer of sculpture, chanted by the ages of faith, becomes,
in the introduction to his work, nothing more than an encyclopaedia of
industrial and moral teaching.

"Let us look closer at all this," Durtal went on, and he went out to
smoke a cigarette on the Place. "That royal doorway," thought he, as he
walked on, "is the entrance to the great front by which kings were
admitted. It is likewise the first chapter of the book, and it sums up
the whole of the building.

"But certainly these conclusions forestalling the premisses are very
strange; this recapitulation, placed at the very beginning of the work,
when it ought, in fact, to be placed at the end, in the apse!

"And yet," he reflected, "putting this aside, the _facade_ thus worked
out fills the position in this basilica which the second of the
Sapiential Books holds in the Bible. It answers to the Book of Psalms,
which is in a certain sense an epitome of all the Books of the Old
Testament, and consequently, at the same time, a prophetic memento of
the whole of revealed religion.

"The western side of the cathedral is similar; only, it is a compendium
not of the older but of the newer Scriptures; an epitome of the Gospels,
an abridgment of the books of St. John and the synoptical Gospels.

"In building this, the twelfth century did more. It added more details
to this glorification of Christ, following Him from before His birth,
through the Bible story, till after His Death and to His Apotheosis as
described in the Apocalypse; it completed the Scriptures by the
Apocryphal writings, telling the tale of Saint Joachim and Saint Anna,
recording many episodes of the marriage of the Virgin and Joseph derived
from the Gospel of the Nativity of the Virgin and _pseudo_-Gospel of St.
James the Less.

"But, indeed, in every early sanctuary such use was made of these
legends, and no church is really intelligible when they are ignored.

"Nor is there anything to surprise us in this mixture of the authentic
Gospels and mere fables. When the Church refused to recognize by
canonical authority the divine origin of the Gospels of the Childhood,
of the Nativity, the writings of St. Thomas the Israelite, of Nicodemus,
of St. James the Less, and the History of Joseph, it had no intention of
rejecting them altogether, and consign