roduce sermons in stones, easy to sermonise in very many
ways; but Jocelin did not preach. He just tried to embody the
Christian spirit at work in the world: God made manifest in man, the
great truth of the Incarnation; and this he did in what we should call
the most modern manner, though in truth it is medieval as well as
modern. He did not conceive of Christianity as confined within the
covers of the Bible, but he took all history, as he knew it, the
patient education of man in the Old Testament, the fulfilment of man's
aspirations and God's purpose in the New, from the birth of our Lord
to the founding of the Church, and the continuation of this church up
to his own time, with especial regard to the heroes, saints and rulers
of the Church of England. He made a "kalendar for unlearned men,"
which is both a _Biblia Pauperum_ and _Annales Angliae_, because the
annals of England were to him a new Bible. "Slowly the Bible of the
race is writ," a modern writer has said, "each age, each kindred, adds
a word to it." That was the spirit of Jocelin's design; only that,
through the pomp of mighty kings and fair women and honoured bishops,
he looked to the naked truth of the judgment time, when mitres and
crowns would remain but as signs of an awful responsibility, and the
divine justice, so tried, so obscured on earth, would be vindicated
before the angels who are quick to do God's will, and the twelve plain
men who turned the mighty currents of the world. Such was the spirit
of a man who lived in the days of St. Francis and St. Louis, Stephen
Langton and Roger Bacon.

Before commencing a detailed description of the statuary, one must
refer to Professor Cockerell, R.A., whose enthusiastic love of the
work led him to construct a theory which he published in 1851, as an
_Iconography of the West Front_. There can be little doubt that he was
right in his general idea; there can be equally little doubt that he
was wrong in nearly every application of it. Everyone now, for
instance, takes it for granted that the south side of the front is
mainly "spiritual," devoted to ecclesiastics, while the north is
"temporal"; and that the whole of the fourth and fifth tiers do
represent certain leading historical figures. But when we read
Cockerell's reasons for identifying these figures we recoil in dismay.
His knowledge of history is superficial, of costume he knows practically
nothing; his drawings are as inaccurate as his imagination is fert