. Gothic
architecture is an expression of the Christian spirit; in it is
manifest the reaction from licentiousness to asceticism. Man's
spiritual nature, awakening in a body worn and weakened by
debaucheries, longs ardently and tries vainly to escape. Of some such
mood a Gothic cathedral is the expression: its vaulting, marvelously
supported upon slender shafts by reason of a nicely adjusted
equilibrium of forces; its restless, upward-reaching pinnacles and
spires; its ornament, intricate and enigmatic--all these suggest the
over-strained organism of an ascetic; while its vast shadowy interior
lit by marvelously traceried and jeweled windows, which hold the eyes
in a hypnotic thrall, is like his soul: filled with world sadness,
dead to the bright brief joys of sense, seeing only heavenly visions,
knowing none but mystic raptures.

Thus it is that the history of architecture illustrates and enforces
the theosophical teaching that everything of man's creating is made in
his own image. Architecture mirrors the life of the individual and of
the race, which is the life of the individual written large in time
and space. The terrors of childhood; the keen interests and appetites
of youth; the strong stern joy of conflict which comes with manhood;
the lust, the greed, the cruelty of a materialized old age--all these
serve but as a preparation for the life of the spirit, in which the
man becomes again as a little child, going over the whole round, but
on a higher arc of the spiral.

The final, or fourth state being only in some sort a repetition of
the first, it would be reasonable to look for a certain correspondence
between Egyptian and Gothic architecture, and such a correspondence
there is, though it is more easily divined than demonstrated. In
both there is the same deeply religious spirit; both convey, in some
obscure yet potent manner, a sense of the soul being near the surface
of life. There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in
both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures
to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to
the gargoyle. The conditions under which each architecture flourished
were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small
well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly enlightened
men--the priesthood in the one case, the masonic guilds in the
other--working together toward the consummation of great undertakings
ami