For these long
processions of saints, representing that great crowd of witnesses of
which S. Paul speaks, stand there above the arcade and under the
clerestory where in a Gothic church the triforium is set. But the
triforium is the one inexplicable and seemingly useless feature of a
Gothic building. It seems to us, in our ignorance of the mind of the
Middle Age, of what it took for granted, to be there simply for the
sake of beauty, to have no use at all. But what if this church in
Ravenna, the work indeed of a very different school and time, but
springing out of the same spiritual tradition, should hold the key?
What if the triforium of a Gothic church should have been built as it
were for a great crowd of witnesses--the invisible witnesses of the
Everlasting Sacrifice, the sacrifice of Calvary, the sacrifice of the
Mass? It is not only in the presence of the living, devout or half
indifferent, that that great sacrifice is offered through the world,
yesterday, to-day, and for ever, but be sure in the midst of the
chivalry of heaven, a multitude that no man can number, none the less
real because invisible, among whom one day we too are to be numbered.
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