You may sometimes see in modern picture galleries an attempt to combine the story from which proceeds the nourishing flame of Christianity with the crudities and the shameful ugliness of our decline.  Thus, with others, a picture of our Lord and Mary Magdalen; all the figures except that of our Lord were dressed in the modern way.  I remember another of our Lord and the little children, where the scene is put into a village school.  Now, if you can imagine (which it is not easy to do) such an attempt to be successful, untouched by the love of display and eccentricity, and informing—­as it commonly pretends to inform—­our time with an idea, then you will understand what the traveller saw that morning in Notre Dame.  The church seemed the vastest cavern that had ever been built for worship.  Coming in from the high morning, the half-light alone, with which we always connect a certain majesty and presence, seemed to have taken on amplitude as well.  The incense veiled what appeared to be an infinite lift of roof, and the third great measurement—­the length of nave that leads like a forest ride to the lights of the choir—­were drawn out into an immeasurable perspective by reason of a countless crowd of men and women divided by the narrow path of the procession.  So full was this great place that a man moved slowly and with difficulty, edging through such a mass of folk as you may find at holiday time in a railway station, or outside a theatre—­never surely before was a church like this, unless, indeed, some very rich or very famous man happened to be gracing it.  But here to-day, for nothing but the function proper to the feast, the cathedral was paved and floored with human beings.  In the galilee there was a kind of movement so that a man could get up further, and at last the traveller found a place to stand in just on the edge of the open gangway, at the very end of the nave.  He peered up this, and saw from the further end, near the altar, the head of the procession approaching, which was (in his fancy of that morning) like the line of the Faith, still living and returning in a perpetual circle to revivify the world.  Moreover, there was in the advent of the procession a kind of climax.  As it came nearer, the great crowd moved more quickly towards it; children were lifted up, and by one of Sully’s wide pillars a group of three young soldiers climbed on a rail to see the great sight better.  The Cardinal-Archbishop, very old and supported by his priests, half walked and half tottered down the length of the people; his head, grown weary with age, barely supported the mitre, from which great jewels, false or true, were flashing.  In his hand he had a crozier that was studded in the same way with gems, and that seemed to be made of gold; the same hands had twisted the metal of it as had hammered the hinges of the cathedral doors.  Certainly there here appeared one of the resurrections of Europe.  The matter of life seemed to take on a fuller stuff and to lift into a dimension above