The three primary architectures seem to have owed their origin to three accidents. The immense and wholly unreasonable massiveness which characterises the Egyptian style is probably due to its having emerged from caverns. It carried into the air its memory of having had the rocky earth for its roof and walls, and of the time when its close-packed squadrons of granite shafts were a necessity which it cost nothing to provide. The Parthenon, again, is a manifest glorification in stone of the forms of the wooden hut; and the pointed arch, with all its immense consequences, arose from the constructional accident of cross-vaulting. Weight, then, which is the most general and characteristic attribute of matter, was taken by the Egyptian, Greek, and Gothic architects as the ground of their several ideas--whether consciously or not, is no concern of ours. The Egyptian architect, as will be shown, subordinated every detail, from the mass of the pyramid--which may be regarded as the form taken by weight in the abstract--down to almost every particular of decoration, to the creation of an effect of compulsory submission to an irresistible and for-ever-enduring material power. The mightiest bulk of Alp or Apennine is a bubble compared with an Egyptian temple, which is the awful _life_ of ponderosity and crushing earthliness; and there is no need to pause in order to point out how aptly this expression suited the political and religious character of the people out of whom Israel fled. In the architecture of Greece, weight--representative of material force--was still the theme; but it was material force which had met with its match, the force of mind; and the ponderous entablature, every detail of which expresses weight, is lifted and borne beautifully in air by a series of members every one of which conveys the impression of an opposite ascendant force, which recognises but does not suffer in the least degree from its burthen, beneath which the animated shaft is seen to fling away a part of its supporting power just at the point where most weight is borne, and the Caryatides of the Pandrosium can afford to stand with one knee bent easily forward. Here, then, again was a great and new phase of the human mind envisaging the universe, expressed by simple reference to weight of material in its temples. The third great phase--that in which an ascetic spirituality, refusing all willing alliance with earthliness, only recognises it as a thing to sbe defied and to be made the measure of the spirit’s predominance--obtained its artistic expression by employing material weight as the symbol of its opponent; which it neither suffers from nor enters into alliance with, but vanquishes, converts, and glorifies in ascending streams of life.