And then, too, how easy it is to make the mistake of thinking that all the grace of antiquity and mellowness that hangs about the old buildings was part of the mediaeval world.  Go back in fancy for a little to the time when that great front of the Cathedral, with its forests of towers and pinnacles, its three vast portals, was brand-new and white, all free from the scaffolding, and fitting on so strangely to the Norman work behind.  I can well imagine that some one who loved what was old and quiet might have thought it even then a very bustling modern affair, and heaved a sigh over the progress that had made it possible.

Moreover, looking closely at that great grey front, with its three portals, I am almost sure that the design is an essentially vulgar one.  It is much of it a front with no back to it; it is crowded with useless and restless ornament.  The rose-windows, for instance, in the gables, give light to nothing but the rafters of the roof.  The designer was evidently afraid of leaving any surface plain and unadorned; he felt impelled to fill every inch with decoration.  Indeed, I cannot doubt that if one saw the West Front reproduced now, the connoisseurs, who praise it so blandly in its mellow softness, would overwhelm it with disapproval and stern criticism.

Whatever that front, those soaring towers, may mean to us now, they stood then for a busy and eager activity.  What one does desire to know, what is really important, is whether the spirit that prompted that activity was a purer, holier, more gracious spirit than the spirit that underlies the middle-class prosperity of the present day.  Did it all mean a love of art, a sacrifice of comfort and wealth to a beautiful idea, a radiant hope?  Did the monks or the great nobles that built it, build it in a humble, ardent, and loving spirit—­or was it partly in a spirit of ostentation, that their church might have a new and impressive front, partly in the spirit indicated by the hymn: 

    “Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee,
    Repaid a thousand-fold will be”?

Was it an investment, so to speak, made for the sake of improving their spiritual prosperity?

It is very difficult to say.  The monks in their earlier missionary times were full of enthusiasm and faith, no doubt.  But when the Abbeys were at the full height of their prosperity, when they were vast landowners and the Abbot had his place in parliament, when the monastic life was a career for an ambitious man, was the spirit of the place a pure and holy one?  That they submitted themselves to a severe routine of worship does not go for very, much, because men very easily accommodate themselves to a traditional and a conventional routine.

And thus one is half inclined to believe that the spirit of the monks in their prosperous days was not very different from the spirit that prompts railway extension, and that builds a railway terminus with an ornamental facade.