The measure of this devotion, which proves to any religious American mind, beyond possible cavil, its serious and practical reality, is the money it cost.  According to statistics, in the single century between 1170 and 1270, the French built eighty cathedrals and nearly five hundred churches of the cathedral class, which would have cost, according to an estimate made in 1840, more than five thousand millions to replace.  Five thousand million francs is a thousand million dollars, and this covered only the great churches of a single century.  The same scale of expenditure had been going on since the year 1000, and almost every parish in France had rebuilt its church in stone; to this day France is strewn with the ruins of this architecture, and yet the still preserved churches of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, among the churches that belong to the Romanesque and Transition period, are numbered by hundreds until they reach well into the thousands.  The share of this capital which was—­if one may use a commercial figure—­invested in the Virgin cannot be fixed, any more than the total sum given to religious objects between 1000 and 1300; but in a spiritual and artistic sense, it was almost the whole, and expressed an intensity of conviction never again reached by any passion, whether of religion, of loyalty, of patriotism, or of wealth; perhaps never even parallelled by any single economic effort, except in war.  Nearly every great church of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries belonged to Mary, until in France one asks for the church of Notre Dame as though it meant cathedral; but, not satisfied with this, she contracted the habit of requiring in all churches a chapel of her own, called in English the “Lady Chapel,” which was apt to be as large as the church but was always meant to be handsomer; and there, behind the high altar, in her own private apartment, Mary sat, receiving her innumerable suppliants, and ready at any moment to step up upon the high altar itself to support the tottering authority of the local saint.

Expenditure like this rests invariably on an economic idea.  Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway system in the belief that they would make money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.  The investment was based on the power of Mary as Queen rather than on any orthodox Church conception of the Virgin’s legitimate station.  Papal Rome never greatly loved Byzantine empresses or French queens.  The Virgin of Chartres was never wholly sympathetic to the Roman Curia.  To this day the Church writers—­like the Abbe Bulteau or M. Rohault de Fleury—­are singularly shy of the true Virgin of majesty, whether at Chartres or at Byzantium or wherever she is seen.  The fathers Martin and Cahier at Bourges alone left her true value.  Had the Church controlled her, the