,
perhaps, going separately to Notre Dame, and a thousand made no show in
such a square. But when he went in through the doors he saw there
something he had never seen before, and that he thought did not exist.
It was as though the vague interior visions of which the morning had
been so full had taken on reality.

You may sometimes see in modern picture galleries an attempt to combine
the story from which proceeds the nourishing flame of Christianity with
the crudities and the shameful ugliness of our decline. Thus, with
others, a picture of our Lord and Mary Magdalen; all the figures except
that of our Lord were dressed in the modern way. I remember another of
our Lord and the little children, where the scene is put into a village
school. Now, if you can imagine (which it is not easy to do) such an
attempt to be successful, untouched by the love of display and
eccentricity, and informing--as it commonly pretends to inform--our time
with an idea, then you will understand what the traveller saw that
morning in Notre Dame. The church seemed the vastest cavern that had
ever been built for worship. Coming in from the high morning, the
half-light alone, with which we always connect a certain majesty and
presence, seemed to have taken on amplitude as well. The incense veiled
what appeared to be an infinite lift of roof, and the third great
measurement--the length of nave that leads like a forest ride to the
lights of the choir--were drawn out into an immeasurable perspective by
reason of a countless crowd of men and women divided by the narrow path
of the procession. So full was this great place that a man moved slowly
and with difficulty, edging through such a mass of folk as you may find
at holiday time in a railway station, or outside a theatre--never surely
before was a church like this, unless, indeed, some very rich or very
famous man happened to be gracing it. But here to-day, for nothing but
the function proper to the feast, the cathedral was paved and floored
with human beings. In the galilee there was a kind of movement so that a
man could get up further, and at last the traveller found a place to
stand in just on the edge of the open gangway, at the very end of the
nave. He peered up this, and saw from the further end, near the altar,
the head of the procession approaching, which was (in his fancy of that
morning) like the line of the Faith, still living and returning in a
perpetual circle to revivify the world. Mo