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It is not exclusively in the laconic expositions of Durand, Bishop of Mende, and of Hugh of Saint-Victor that one must seek the testimonies, the proofs, and the solutions to the hieratic symbolism at last suspected today in the basilicas of the Middle Ages. Two isolated authorities would not suffice in so grave a matter, and these writers, moreover, having devoted very few pages to the description of the material church, the gap left by their explanations is immense. Much progress would have been made in this interesting science, so rich in forgotten treasures, if, instead of hoping to find enlightenment in treatises on Christian architecture and iconography—which the so-called hieratic ages certainly did not provide—people had thought to consult the immutable and primary source of Christian mystagogy: this source is the Holy Scriptures. Indeed, it is only the Bible and its various commentaries that can reveal the secret of the mystical tropology of our religious monuments. It is there that one finds the allusions underlying those lines, forms, and masses whose types, slowly elaborated and acquiring with each century greater grace, nobility, and grandeur, were immediately accepted, popularized, and reproduced with an exactitude and likewise a ubiquity proving that, in hieratic times, beauty possessed fixed rules, principles, and motives known at least to the architects who thus reproduced it. These architects, so fully in accord in preserving intact the unity of types and traditions, were monks, abbots, and prelates united by the profession of the same beliefs, and who maintained this deposit in these ‘texts written in stone’ with as ardent a zeal as they preserved it in their books.