degeneracy: that soldier become conqueror, decked out in plundered
finery and sunk in sensuality, tolerant of all who minister to his
pleasures but terrible to all who interfere with them.

The fall of Rome marked the end of the ancient Pagan world. Above
its ruin Christian civilization in the course of time arose. Gothic
architecture is an expression of the Christian spirit; in it is
manifest the reaction from licentiousness to asceticism. Man's
spiritual nature, awakening in a body worn and weakened by
debaucheries, longs ardently and tries vainly to escape. Of some such
mood a Gothic cathedral is the expression: its vaulting, marvelously
supported upon slender shafts by reason of a nicely adjusted
equilibrium of forces; its restless, upward-reaching pinnacles and
spires; its ornament, intricate and enigmatic--all these suggest the
over-strained organism of an ascetic; while its vast shadowy interior
lit by marvelously traceried and jeweled windows, which hold the eyes
in a hypnotic thrall, is like his soul: filled with world sadness,
dead to the bright brief joys of sense, seeing only heavenly visions,
knowing none but mystic raptures.

Thus it is that the history of architecture illustrates and enforces
the theosophical teaching that everything of man's creating is made in
his own image. Architecture mirrors the life of the individual and of
the race, which is the life of the individual written large in time
and space. The terrors of childhood; the keen interests and appetites
of youth; the strong stern joy of conflict which comes with manhood;
the lust, the greed, the cruelty of a materialized old age--all these
serve but as a preparation for the life of the spirit, in which the
man becomes again as a little child, going over the whole round, but
on a higher arc of the spiral.