Te requirunt vota fidelium,
 Ad te corda suspirant omnium,
 Tu spes nostra post Deum unica,
 Advocata nobis es posita. 
 Ad judicis matrem confugiunt,
 Qui judicis iram effugiunt,
 Quae praecari pro eis cogitur,
 Quae pro reis mater efficitur.

“After the Trinity, you are our only hope”; spes nostra unica; “you are placed there as our advocate; all of us who fear the wrath of the Judge, fly to the Judge’s mother, who is logically compelled to sue for us, and stands in the place of a mother to the guilty.”  Abelard’s logic was always ruthless, and the “cogitur” is a stronger word than one would like to use now, with a priest in hearing.  We need not insist on it; but what one must insist on, is the good faith of the whole people,—­kings, queens, princes of all sorts, philosophers, poets, soldiers, artists, as well as of the commoners like ourselves, and the poor,—­for the good faith of the priests is not important to the understanding, since any class which is sufficiently interested in believing will always believe.  In order to feel Gothic architecture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, one must feel first and last, around and above and beneath it, the good faith of the public, excepting only Jews and atheists, permeating every portion of it with the conviction of an immediate alternative between heaven and hell, with Mary as the only court in equity capable of overruling strict law.

The Virgin was a real person, whose tastes, wishes, instincts, passions, were intimately known.  Enough of the Virgin’s literature survives to show her character, and the course of her daily life.  We know more about her habits and thoughts than about those of earthly queens.  The “Miracles de la Vierge” make a large part, and not the poorest part, of the enormous literature of these two centuries, although the works of Albertus Magnus fill twenty-one folio volumes and those of Thomas Aquinas fill more, while the “Chansons de Geste” and the “Romans,” published or unpublished, are a special branch of literature with libraries to themselves.  The collection of the Virgin’s miracles put in verse by Gaultier de Coincy, monk, prior, and poet, between 1214 and 1233—­the precise moment of the Chartres sculpture and glass—­contains thirty thousand lines.  Another great collection, narrating especially the miracles of the Virgin of Chartres, was made by a priest of Chartres Cathedral about 1240.  Separate series, or single tales, have appeared and are appearing constantly, but no general collection has ever been made, although the whole poetic literature of the Virgin could be printed in the space of two or three volumes of scholastic philosophy, and if the Church had cared half as truly for the Virgin as it has for Thomas Aquinas, every miracle might have been collected and published a score of times.  The miracles themselves, indeed, are not very numerous.  In Gaultier de Coincy’s collection they number only about fifty.  The