Nearly the whole side of a Gothic church was made of glass. These large windows were not, however, plain white glass, but beautiful pictures made of colored glass. Small pieces of different colors were joined together at their edges with lead to make what looked like wonderful paintings. But these pictures were much finer than ordinary paintings, for the light shone through the stained glass and made the colors brilliant as jewels—blue like the clear sky, yellow like sunlight, red like a ruby. These pictures in glass told stories from the Bible. They were like colored illustrations in a book. So the people who could not read, and very few could read, were able to know the Bible stories just by looking at these beautiful illustrations.
Statues of saints and angels and characters in the Bible were carved in the stonework of the church. So the churches were like Bibles of stone and glass.
Besides these holy beings, strange, grotesque beasts were also made in stone—monsters like no animal that has ever been seen in nature. These creatures were usually put on the outside edge or corner of the roof or they were used for waterspouts and called gargoyles. They were supposed to scare away evil spirits from the holy place.
Gargoyle.
No one now knows who were the architects or the builders of these Gothic churches or who were the sculptors or artists. Almost every one did some work on the church, for it was his church. Instead of giving money he gave his time and labor. If he had any skill, he carved stone or made stained glass. If he had no skill he did the work of a common laborer.
Some of these Gothic churches took hundreds of years to build, so that the workmen who started them never lived to see them finished. Some of the most famous cathedrals are Canterbury Cathedral in England, the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, and Cologne Cathedral in Germany.
Cologne Cathedral took the longest of all to build, as it was not entirely finished until about seven hundred years after it was begun! The beautiful Cathedral of Rheims in France was almost destroyed by the gun-fire of the Germans in the Great War only a few years ago.
Gothic churches were built, with loving care, of stone and jeweled glass. Nothing but the best was thought good enough. To-day almost all churches are still built with spires, pointed doors and some stained glass windows, and often the altar is toward the east. But although they imitate the Gothic style in these things, they seldom have stone ceilings, as Gothic churches had, nor flying buttresses, nor walls of stained glass. The ceilings are usually of wood, the spire often of wood, also, and even the whole building of wood or some cheap material. Real Gothic was enormously expensive and difficult, and nowadays people haven’t the time, the money, nor the interest to build in such a way.
And that is the story of Gothic churches that the Goths had nothing to do with.