One cannot take seriously the idea that the three doors, the three portals, and the three aisles express the Trinity, because, in the first place, there was no rule about it; churches might have what portals and aisles they pleased; both Paris and Bourges have five; the doors themselves are not allotted to the three members of the Trinity, nor are the portals; while another more serious objection is that the side doors and aisles are not of equal importance with the central, but mere adjuncts and dependencies, so that the architect who had misled the ignorant public into accepting so black a heresy would have deserved the stake, and would probably have gone to it.  Even this suggestion of trinity is wanting in the transepts, which have only one aisle, and in the choir, which has five, as well as five or seven chapels, and, as far as an ignorant mind can penetrate, no triplets whatever.  Occasionally, no doubt, you will discover in some sculpture or window, a symbol of the Trinity, but this discovery itself amounts to an admission of its absence as a controlling idea, for the ordinary worshipper must have been at least as blind as we are, and to him, as to us, it would have seemed a wholly subordinate detail.  Even if the Trinity, too, is anywhere expressed, you will hardly find here an attempt to explain its metaphysical meaning—­not even a mystic triangle.

The church is wholly given up to the Mother and the Son.  The Father seldom appears; the Holy Ghost still more rarely.  At least, this is the impression made on an ordinary visitor who has no motive to be orthodox; and it must have been the same with the thirteenth-century worshipper who came here with his mind absorbed in the perfections of Mary.  Chartres represents, not the Trinity, but the identity of the Mother and Son.  The Son represents the Trinity, which is thus absorbed in the Mother.  The idea is not orthodox, but this is no affair of ours.  The Church watches over its own.

The Virgin’s wants and tastes, positive and negative, ought now to be clear enough to enable you to feel the artist’s sincerity in trying to satisfy them; but first you have still to convince yourselves of the people’s sincerity in employing the artists.  This point is the easiest of all, for the evidence is express.  In the year 1145 when the old fleche was begun,—­the year before Saint Bernard preached the second crusade at Vezelay,—­Abbot Haimon, of Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives in Normandy, wrote to the monks of Tutbury Abbey in England a famous letter to tell of the great work which the Virgin was doing in France and which began at the Church of Chartres.  “Hujus sacrae institutionis ritus apud Carnotensem ecclesiam est inchoatus.”  From Chartres it had spread through Normandy, where it produced among other things the beautiful spire which we saw at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives.  “Postremo per totam fere Normanniam longe lateque convaluit ac loca per singula Matri misericordiae dicata praecipue