In its beginnings Gothic architecture was an attempt at economy, the trying for something less massive and ornate than the great Benedictine piles of inert masonry. By cleverly developing a system of balanced thrusts, the sheer bulk of masonry was reduced by half, while attention was drawn away from the fast-increasing ornamentation to the shell itself, whereby a great gain was effected, and architecture became once more a study in organism, in composition, and in proportion. Gothic is primarily the perfection of exquisite organism, almost living in its consummate integrity and its sensitive interplay of forces. This perfectly co-ordinated structure is, of course, infused and transfigured by an intense sense of beauty, quite new in its forms, and given a spiritual and symbolical content peculiar to itself, the result being what, for want of a better term, we call Gothic. The two elements cannot be disassociated, as pedants feign, for, like all great art, it is in a sense sacramental, and the “outward and visible sign” may never be separated from the “inward and spiritual grace.”[A] [A] “Sacramentum est corporale vel materiale elementum foris sensibiliter propositum ex similitudine repræsentans, et ex institutione significans et ex sanctificatione continens, aliquam invisibilem et spiritualem gratiam.”--(Hugo de St. Victoire.) Both processes may be followed through the great sequence of churches between the Seine, the Marne, and the Somme--or might have been a year ago. To-day it is safe to postulate nothing of a dim and ominous future; we know that much of this galaxy has been destroyed after seven centuries of careful cherishing through innumerable wars and revolutions. That all may go is possible, as the power that brought them into existence has gone, though in this case only for a time. Once, however, the great and triumphal progress from Jumièges through Noyon, Senlis, St. Denis, Laon, Paris, Amiens, to its final achievement at Reims, was a complete and visible record of the greatest and most headlong advance toward the real things in Christian civilisation by means of the real things in Christian civilisation history has ever recorded. Five of these--Senlis, Noyon, Laon, Amiens, and Reims lie either within the battle lines that have maintained themselves so long, or at least within sound of the guns; one has been destroyed--Reims; one thus far preserved--Amiens. The fate of the others is in doubt, together with that of all the lands that lie to the east, and the danger of irreparable loss is greater than ever before since the French Revolution.