Elsewhere, too, there is variegated glass, gigantic filigree work, festive decoration, as elaborated as that of a queen or a bride; infinite grandeur and infinite littleness.[21] The ornament is nervous and excited, festoons, trefoils, gables, gargoyles and niches, all thrust themselves at you; all strive for individual effect, individual attention, and individual value, with a restlessness and an importunacy which knows no limits; until your eyes, bewildered and dazzled by the jutting, projecting and budding details, and out-startled by surprise, instinctively drop at last, and perhaps close in a paroxysm of despair, before the High Altar.[22] This was the germ of Protestantism in stone. Long before Martin Luther burned the Papal Bull in the market-place of Wittenberg, the elements of Protestantism had already found expression in Gothic architecture. True the Pagan and Catholic spirit was still sufficiently master to dominate them, just as it did the heretics, by a tremendous force of style; but they are nevertheless present, and it is in this architecture, if we choose to seek it, that we shall find, at once, all the beauty, all the ugliness, and all the incompatible elements of the Christian ideal. Its beauty and the fact for which we ought to be grateful to it, is, that by its one-sided and earnest advocacy of the spiritual in man, it extended the domain of his spirit over an area so much greater than that which had been covered theretofore, that only now can it be said that he knows exactly where he stands and who he is. Its ugliness lies in its contempt of the body and of Life; and its incompatible elements are its negation of Life and the necessary attitude of affirmation towards Life which all living creatures are bound to assume. If, however, the above description of the Gothic may seem unfair, hear what one of the greatest friends of the Gothic has said on the subject! John Ruskin, in the early days of the last half of the nineteenth century, wrote as follows-- "I believe that the characteristic or moral elements of the Gothic are the following, placed in order of their importance: (1) Savageness, (2) Changefulness, (3) Naturalism, (4) Grotesqueness, (5) Rigidity, (6) Redundance."[23] He speaks of it as being "instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the Northern Sea";[24] lays stress upon its rudeness,[25] and declares that it is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit--that is its greatness, "that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied."[26]