Indeed, when you look longer at it, you begin to doubt whether there is any repose in it at all,—­whether it is not the most unreposeful thought ever put into architectural form.  Perched on the extreme point of this abrupt rock, the Church Militant with its aspirant Archangel stands high above the world, and seems to threaten heaven itself.  The idea is the stronger and more restless because the Church of Saint Michael is surrounded and protected by the world and the society over which it rises, as Duke William rested on his barons and their men.  Neither the Saint nor the Duke was troubled by doubts about his mission.  Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont-Saint-Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.  Neither Church nor State is intellectual, or learned, or even strict in dogma.  Here we do not feel the Trinity at all; the Virgin but little; Christ hardly more; we feel only the Archangel and the Unity of God.  We have little logic here, and simple faith, but we have energy.  We cannot do many things which are done in the centre of civilization, at Byzantium, but we can fight, and we can build a church.  No doubt we think first of the church, and next of our temporal lord; only in the last instance do we think of our private affairs, and our private affairs sometimes suffer for it; but we reckon the affairs of Church and State to be ours, too, and we carry this idea very far.  Our church on the Mount is ambitious, restless, striving for effect; our conquest of England, with which the Duke is infatuated, is more ambitious still; but all this is a trifle to the outburst which is coming in the next generation; and Saint Michael on his Mount expresses it all.

Taking architecture as an expression of energy, we can some day compare Mont-Saint-Michel with Beauvais, and draw from the comparison whatever moral suits our frame of mind; but you should first note that here, in the eleventh century, the Church, however simple-minded or unschooled, was not cheap.  Its self-respect is worth noticing, because it was short-lived in its art.  Mont-Saint-Michel, throughout, even up to the delicate and intricate stonework of its cloisters, is built of granite.  The crypts and substructures are as well constructed as the surfaces most exposed to view.  When we get to Chartres, which is largely a twelfth-century work, you will see that the cathedral there, too, is superbly built, of the hardest and heaviest stone within reach, which has nowhere settled or given way; while, beneath, you will find a crypt that rivals the church above.  The thirteenth century did not build so.  The great cathedrals after 1200 show economy, and sometimes worse.  The world grew cheap, as worlds must.