half eleventh century, and building was probably at its height
about A.D. 1140 to 1150; but at this period an extraordinary thing
happened. Hitherto the arches in the Norman style were round-headed
and their columns enormously thick to carry them; but suddenly the
style changed into the beautiful Gothic all over Europe. No single
country can claim precedence, it was almost simultaneous; churches
half finished in the round style were not only completed in the
pointed, but had parts already built altered to the new style. What,
then, determined this sudden change, resulting in a wonderful
accession of beauty to Architectural design? We must go to the
Monasteries and Religious Houses to find the explanation. These Houses
had become the Patrons of Masonry, the providers of the funds for
building Cathedrals, &c.; it naturally followed that, growing up
alongside the Operative Science, there was a Religious symbolism being
gradually formed which attached itself specially to the tools used by
Masons, and thus formed the basis of Moral teaching--"to act on the
Square," "to keep within the bounds of the Compasses," "to be Level in
all your dealings," &c., &c. A wonderful, new, and Mystical form of
Symbolism was opened to them with the advent of Geometry. The
text-book of Geometry was unknown throughout the whole of Europe,
omitting Spain, from the sixth to the beginning of the twelfth
century; it was, as I have pointed out, well known in Greece before
our Era, and continued to be so up to about the sixth century A.D. In
the fourth century lived the Greek, Theon of Alexandria, so well known
for his edition of Euclid's Elements, with notes, from which all Greek
MSS. which first came to light in the sixteenth century were taken,
being entitled [Greek: ek ton Theonos synousion], "from Theon's
Lectures," and which he probably used as a text-book in his classes;
but these MSS. had all been lost before the seventh century, and were
not recovered again until the sixteenth century, when Simon Grynaeus,
the greatest Greek scholar on the Continent, and companion of
Melancthon and Luther, discovered a copy in Constantinople. Meanwhile,
Theon's edition had been translated into Arabic, and thus preserved by
the Mohammedans, and it was only at the beginning of the twelfth
century that Athelard of Bath, who had been travelling in the East,
came to study at Cordova, in Spain, and there found the Arabic MSS. of
Euclid; these he translated into Lati