Whether one accepts the mysticism of the Rhine or not does not matter; it was a potent element in the flowering of Christian piety and the development of Catholic theology, and Elizabeth of Schönau, Hildegarde of Bingen, Mary of Ognies, Liutgard of Tongres, Mechtilde of Magdebourg, are all names that connote a poignancy of spiritual experience that proves both the personal exaltation of the time and the quality of the blood that had issue in character such as theirs. This mystical vision of the holy women of the Rhine is simply an extreme intensification of the same vision that was given in lesser measure and in different ways to all the creative artists, philosophers, and theologians of the Middle Ages, from Othloh of the eleventh to St. Bonaventure of the thirteenth century, and it had a great part in determining and fixing the artistic manifestation of this amazing time. Both as a result and an influence it is vastly important and not to be ignored. Out of it came much of that marvellous symbolism of the mass and the cathedral so explicitly set forth by the monk Durandus and Vincent of Beauvais, and for its good offices here alone the world owes it a deep and lasting gratitude. One is tempted to go on through other fields where the harvest is plenteous, but an end must be made, and it is here. There remains the question of the issue of it all--whether out of this latest devastation that so adequately follows those of the nineteenth century, of the French Revolution, of Protestantism and the wars of religion, of the Hundred Years’ War with England, any compensation may come for the progressive (and as yet unfinished) destruction of the art records of a great past. If we consider alone the wide ruin in Flanders and Brabant, in Artois and Picardy and Champagne, there seems no possible compensation for what we ourselves knew and now have lost for ever. Nevertheless, the law of the universe is death that life may come; and out of this present death that is so immeasurably more wide-spread and inclusive than any known before, even when the Huns or the Moslems were on their deadly march across Europe, there should come a proportionately fuller life, a “life more abundant,” than that which is now in dissolution. If this is so, if we can look across the plains of death and immeasurable destruction to the dimly seen peaks of the mountain frontiers of a new Land of Promise, then we can see Louvain and Liége, Ypres and Arras, Laon and Soissons and Reims pass in the crash and the dim smoke of obliteration, content with their tragic destiny, even as we can see poured out as a new oblation the ten millions of lives, the tears of an hundred millions of those who follow down into the Valley of the Shadow of Death.