To paint a rose-colored picture of the two best centuries of the Middle Ages would be absurd. They were full of very evil things. There were horrifying episodes in them. "Barbarism tempered by religion; religion disfigured by barbarism," is the definition of Balmes, the theologian. The inconsistencies were gigantic. The same men who sacked Constantinople in 1204, dealing art a staggering blow, were the very men who in western Europe were building cathedrals. Then, as now, there were many for whom religion served as a convenient cloak for the lower instincts; then, as now, there were many who never lost sight of the higher ideals. Side by side with the evil and the self-seeking should be set the sublime impulses which checked those untutored generations. Do not hide the merciless laying waste of Languedoc by the north, but do not forget that, in the same hour, men had reached an abnegation of self that led them to the African coast as voluntary substitutes for their brother Christians in bondage there. In the midst of its human infirmities it was an age that aspired: its poets sang of the Holy Grail, its kings and its serfs were saints, there were saint scholars and barons and merchants, there was even a saint lawyer. It is precisely the restored balance between good and evil which the study of Gothic art is bringing about. The partisan may go on compiling a police gazette and call it history.[20] While the towers of Gothic churches point upward, he is refuted. The modern mind has once for all grasped that it is psychologically impossible for an age to have been sunk in blind superstition when it could build, not merely one or two, but hundreds of churches whose every line is an aspiration toward sanctity. The cathedrals are the true apologetics of the Middle Ages. Archæology is again proving its claim to be the soul of history. CHAPTER II Abbot Suger and St. Denis-en-France Under the impulse of this monk, truly great in all things, Gothic architecture was born.--FÉLIX DE VERNEILH (of Abbot Suger). The churches built during the evolution from Romanesque to Gothic have been called transitional, a classification which would be most convenient for the amateur, had not archæologists decided it was an equivocal term. They say that, during the short period when "Romanesque and Gothic inhabited under the same roof," the Romanesque parts of the edifice were placed side by side with the simultaneously built Gothic parts, that there was juxtaposition, but no fusion. Vaults were either barrel, groin, or of the diagonal-rib type; there was no such thing as a transition form of vault. Arches were either round or pointed; there was no such thing as a transition or intermediary form of arch. And since the radical distinction between Romanesque and Gothic is caused by the vaulting, it is correct to call that part of a church where was groin or barrel vault Romanesque, and that part where were used the intersecting ribs Gothic.