Prussians in their brief occupation on their way to defeat at the Marne had no time to leave their mark. Now that Reims is gone, Amiens must remain (if it does remain) the great and crowning exemplar of Christian sculpture at its highest and most triumphant cresting of achievement. It is hard to write of the sculptures of Reims, or of anything dead and foully mutilated. For generations the thousands of carved figures stood in their niches growing grey and weather-worn through the passing of years--neglected, unnoticed, despised--while silly effigies were turned out by incompetent bunglers to receive the laudation of the haunters of international expositions and the galleries of the Salon. Then suddenly a dim light showed itself and grew steadily brighter until at last, a year or two ago, the consciousness became sure that here was one of the very great things in the world, one of the few supreme products of man in his highest and most unfamiliar estate, priceless and unreplaceable, as the Parthenon or the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, or the plays of Shakespeare, or the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And the long-delayed knowledge came to us only to be turned into a memory, the new possession was ours only to be taken away, and now nevermore for ever can it be granted to us to live in and with this perished art, for it is gone as utterly as the lost dramas of Sophocles, the burned library of Alexandria, the “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci. “The fool hath said in his heart, ‘there is no God,’” and the fool hath said in his heart: “I am greater and more precious than silly works of art.” What is the result of this insolence, the “Pomeranian grenadier” type of insolence that exalts an ignorant, degraded, useless hulk of dull flesh and blood over the supreme works of divinely inspired men? Under the lash of industrialism he can transform coal and iron into money values; he can fight for markets overseas where his masters can sell articles no man needs, to people who do not want them; he can beget children after his own kind, in their turn to do likewise, and finally--though this is not the appealing argument to the partisans of his essential superiority--he has an immortal soul he is doing his best to lose, and frequently succeeding to admiration. Are the vile types that revealed themselves in rape and murder and mutilation in the undefended villages of Belgium, or those under whose orders they acted, more worth saving for further industry of the same nature than the “Worship of the Lamb” in Ghent or the sculptures of the northwest door of Reims? It is an easy argument to offer, the sanctity of human life, but it is not the motive behind the batteries on the hills to the east of the devastated capital of Champagne, month after month pouring shell on the greatest cathedral that the Christianity of the West has reared to the glory of God. The motive behind the batteries is an instinctive