Perhaps, however, the most significant phenomenon about the church is its loneliness; nothing like it was built elsewhere, and the reason seems plain. There was but one imperial court which needed so superb a setting, and but one emperor who could pay for it. Herein lies the radical divergence between the East and West; the great tabernacle of Constantinople stood alone because it represented the wealth, the pomp, and the imagination of the barbarian shepherd who had been raised by fortune to be the chief of police of the city where the world’s wealth had centralized. In France every diocese had a temple magnificent according to its means, some of which exceeded in majesty that of Paris; and the cause was that, in France, the artistic and imaginative caste formed a theocracy, who were not hired by king or emperor, but who were themselves the strongest force in all the land. In the East, the imaginative inroad was not strong enough to cause disintegration, and the artists always remained wage-earners. In the West, society fell back a thousand years, and consolidation began afresh. Six centuries intervened between the death of Galla Placidia and the famous dream of the monk Gauzon which contained the revelation of the plan of the Abbey of Cluny, and yet six hundred years by no means represented the gap between the Franks and the Burgundians, and the Eastern Empire, even when it sank lowest under Heraclius. To Justinian the building of Saint Sophia was a matter of time and money; to Saint Hugh the church of Cluny was a miracle. In France the churches long were miracles; the chronicles are filled with the revelations vouchsafed the monks; and none can cross the threshold of one of these noble monuments and fail to grasp its meaning. They are the most vigorous of all expressions of fear of the unseen. The Gothic architect heeded no living potentate; he held kings in contempt, and oftener represented them thrust down into hell than seated on their thrones. With the enemy who lurked in darkness none but the saints could cope, and them he idealized. No sculpture is more terrible than the demons on the walls of Rheims, none more majestic and pathetic than that over the door of the Virgin at Paris, while no colour ever equalled the windows of Saint Denis and Chartres. With the thirteenth century came the influx of the Eastern trade and the rise of the communes. Immediately the glory of the Gothic began to fade; by the reign of Saint Louis it had passed its prime, and under Philip the Fair it fell in full decline. The men who put dead cats in shrines were not likely to be inspired in religious sculpture. The decay, and the reasons for it, can be readily traced in colour.