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[Page 24]
gleaming spirit ever hovers, fortifying and vitalising her troubled soul. But she has been tried and troubled before; when we ourselves beset her. Yet she rose and drove us out; and we should be glad, now that we are fighting side by side, that she did; for, we can say that, what each of us endured at the hands of the other in honorable fight, together we can endure from a foe as unscrupulous and foul as we were fair and clean. That, what in chivalrous battle we inflicted on each other, together, with one mind, one body, one soul, one strength we will inflict tenfold, on a maniacally-perverted, common enemy. It would be monstrous to think that, a structure such as France has raised, by long, self-sacrificing pains, should be broken down by a horde, whose efforts at culture, imposed from outside, have always resulted in something grotesque and childish. Where quaintness was desired the Germans inevitably achieved the bizarre: where simplicity, the infantile; where majesty, the pompous; where subtlety, the involved; where sentiment, mush. Their evil, murky, imitation souls permitted them to plunge themselves into unfathomable sin when they destroyed the material of which were built Louvain and Rheims. When these places were built, miracles were done; and their destruction will work miracles, for, of their tumbled stones, a causeway will be built, To Victory and Glory; the Victory of faith; the Glory of high Ideals. The Architect Trustees of the worship, which the French nation entrusted to their hands, to be embodied in tangible, ever-present, enduring form, took no credit for their wondrous designs, (the results of which they never beheld), but declared that an angelic envoy had delivered them complete into their unworthy hands. And, so he had. A thousand years later he will deliver their enemies into their hands, or those of their brothers of to-day, which is the same thing. Not only were these stone symbols evidence of high faith but they were evidence of high and steadfast intellectual spirits. Reading, in those morning twilight days of France, was only for clerks; and for few of them. So they made these temples speak in sculptured images, which all could understand. Within, these carved forms were wholly of