The fall of Rome marked the end of the ancient Pagan world.  Above its ruin Christian civilization in the course of time arose.  Gothic architecture is an expression of the Christian spirit; in it is manifest the reaction from licentiousness to asceticism.  Man’s spiritual nature, awakening in a body worn and weakened by debaucheries, longs ardently and tries vainly to escape.  Of some such mood a Gothic cathedral is the expression:  its vaulting, marvelously supported upon slender shafts by reason of a nicely adjusted equilibrium of forces; its restless, upward-reaching pinnacles and spires; its ornament, intricate and enigmatic—­all these suggest the over-strained organism of an ascetic; while its vast shadowy interior lit by marvelously traceried and jeweled windows, which hold the eyes in a hypnotic thrall, is like his soul:  filled with world sadness, dead to the bright brief joys of sense, seeing only heavenly visions, knowing none but mystic raptures.

Thus it is that the history of architecture illustrates and enforces the theosophical teaching that everything of man’s creating is made in his own image.  Architecture mirrors the life of the individual and of the race, which is the life of the individual written large in time and space.  The terrors of childhood; the keen interests and appetites of youth; the strong stern joy of conflict which comes with manhood; the lust, the greed, the cruelty of a materialized old age—­all these serve but as a preparation for the life of the spirit, in which the man becomes again as a little child, going over the whole round, but on a higher arc of the spiral.

The final, or fourth state being only in some sort a repetition of the first, it would be reasonable to look for a certain correspondence between Egyptian and Gothic architecture, and such a correspondence there is, though it is more easily divined than demonstrated.  In both there is the same deeply religious spirit; both convey, in some obscure yet potent manner, a sense of the soul being near the surface of life.  There is the same love of mystery and of symbolism; and in both may be observed the tendency to create strange composite figures to typify transcendental ideas, the sphinx seeming a blood-brother to the gargoyle.  The conditions under which each architecture flourished were not dissimilar, for each was formulated and controlled by small well-organized bodies of sincerely religious and highly enlightened men—­the priesthood in the one case, the masonic guilds in the other—­working together toward the consummation of great undertakings amid a populace for the most part oblivious of the profound and subtle meanings of which their work was full.  In Mediaeval Europe, as in ancient Egypt, fragments of the Ancient Wisdom—­transmitted in the symbols and secrets of the cathedral builders—­determined much of Gothic architecture.