The key-note of all this is contained in those verses of the “Dies Irae,”—­

  “Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
  Redemisti crucem passus;
  Tantus labor non sit cassus.”

Here we have in its compactest expression the difference between this age and the classic:  that I, the vilest of sinners, am the object of God’s highest care,—­not the failure and mistake I seem, not the slag and refuse of Nature’s working, but the object of this most stupendous mystery of the Divine economy.  It is no purification or idealizing that is needed,—­any such attempt must be abomination,—­but a new birth of the self, by devotion of it to the purpose for which it was made.

The astounding discovery is slowly realized, and the statement of it difficult, from the need to distinguish between the true self and the false, and to declare that this importance belongs to the individual in virtue of his spiritual nature alone.  The sainthood of the saint is not to be confounded with his personality.  What have his virtues to do with his gown and shoes? what, indeed, with his natural disposition, as courageous, irascible, avaricious?  The difficulty is pervading, not to be avoided; every aspect of him reveals only what is external, dies from him daily, and, if isolated, has already lost its meaning.  It is only in his work, in his connection with the world, that we see him truly.  Accordingly, the statue becomes the group, and the group a member of a series, a cycle in which each is incomplete without the rest.  The classic ideal is shivered into fragments, all to be taken together to make up the meaning.  Of the hundreds of statues and reliefs that surround the great Northern cathedrals, (Didron counts eighteen hundred upon the outside of Chartres,—­nine thousand in all, carved or painted, inside and outside,) each has its appointed place in the sacred epos in stone that unfolds about the building from left to right of the beholder the history of the world from the Creation to the Judgment, and subordinated in parallel symbolism the daily life of the community, whatever occupied and interested men,—­their virtues and vices, trades and recreations, the seasons and the elements, jokes, even, and sharp hits at the great and at the clergy, scenes from popular romances, and the radicalism of Reynard the Fox,—­in short, all that touched the mind of the age, an impartial reflex of the great drama of life, wherein all exists alike to the glory of God.

It is not the glory of earth that is here celebrated.  M. Didron says the statues which the mob pulled down from the churches, at the first French Revolution, as the images of their kings, were the kings and heroes of the Old Testament.  Had they known this, it might not have saved the statues, but it shows how wide a gulf separated these men from their fathers, that their hands were not held by some instinct that here was the first hint of the fundamental idea of Democracy,—­the sovereign importance of man, not as powerful, wise, beautiful, not in virtue of any chance advantage of birth, but in virtue of his religious nature, of the infinite possibilities he infolds.