Seven hundred years afterward the donjon of St. Aliquis is an ivy-covered ruin. Vanished is the monastery; vanished, too, the peasants' huts. In the smoky industrial city on the site of Pontdebois not one ancient stone seems left upon another. But, hold! Soaring high above ugly roof and factory chimney, with its airy pinnacles denouncing a life of materialism and doubt, visited by admiring pilgrims from beyond the Sea of Darkness, the great fabric of the gray cathedral remains.
FOOTNOTES:
[127] Few or no cathedrals were really completed at any time, in the sense that all the details of their design were brought to perfection.
[128] For example, Notre Dame de Paris covered four times the floor area of the Parthenon at Athens (a decidedly large Greek temple) with its nave thrice as high as the older building. Of course, a Greek temple was primarily for housing a holy image; the great sacrifices and the throng of worshippers would be outside the edifice in the open, unlike a Christian church.
[129] One device was to take an extra-precious relic and intrust it to monks, who would place it in a cart and drive through a wide region haranguing the faithful and holding out a purse for them to fill. At Rouen one of the cathedral towers was known as the "Butter Tower," because it was largely built with money given for permission to eat butter in Lent.
[130] At Rheims, prior to the German bombardment of 1914, there were more than two thousand statues.
[131] During this period there were built in France some eighty cathedrals and more than five hundred large and superior churches in this Gothic style.
[132] Such figures would indicate that Pontdebois Cathedral was somewhat smaller than Notre Dame de Paris. It could rank up well among the great churches of France, yet not at all in the first class.
[133] St. John of Damascus, writing in the Orient in the eighth century, gave what amounted to the standard justification of holy images and pictures in churches and for the veneration of the same:
"I am too poor to possess books, I have no leisure for reading. I enter the church choked with the cares of the world; the glowing colors attract my sight like a flowery meadow; and the glory of God steals imperceptibly into my soul. I gaze on the fortitude of the martyr and the crown with which he is rewarded, and the fire of holy emulation is kindled within me. I fall down and worship God through the martyr; and I receive salvation."