And what should we have gained by it, but more ignorance of the excuses for Popery, and, therefore, of its real dangers?  If Protestantism be the truth, knowledge of whatsoever kind can only further it.  We have found it so in the case of classical literature.  Why should we strain at a gnat and swallow a camel?  Our boys have not taken to worshipping Jupiter and Juno by reading about them.  We never feared that they would.  We knew that we should not make them pagans by teaching them justly to admire the poetry, the philosophy, the personal virtues of pagans.  And, in fact, the few who since the revival of letters have deserted Christianity for what they called philosophic heathenism, have in almost every case sympathised, not with the excellences, but with the worst vices of the Greek and Roman.  They have been men like Leo X. or the Medici, who, ready to be profligates under any religion, found in heathenism only an excuse for their darling sins.  The same will be the fruits of a real understanding of the medieval religion.  It will only endanger those who carried already the danger in themselves, and would have fallen into some other snare if this had been away.  Why should we fancy that Protestantism, like the Romanism which it opposes, is a plant that will not bear the light, and can only be protected at the expense of the knowledge of facts?  Why will we forgot the great spiritual law which Mrs. Jameson and others in these days are fully recognising, that “we cannot safely combat the errors of any man or system without first giving them full credit for whatever excellences they may retain”?  Such a course is the true fruit of that free spirit of Protestantism which ought to delight in recognising good to whatever party it may belong; which asserts that every good gift and perfect gift comes directly from above, and not through the channel of particular formularies or priesthoods; which, because it loves faith and virtue, for their own sakes, and not as mere parts of a “Catholic system,” can recognise them and delight in them wherever it finds them.

Upon these creations of ancient art (as Mrs. Jameson says) we cannot look as those did for whom they were created; we cannot annihilate the centuries which lie between us and them; we cannot in simplicity of heart, forget the artist in the image he has placed before us, nor supply what may be deficient in his work through a reverentially excited fancy.  We are critical, not credulous.  We no longer accept this polytheistic form of Christianity; and there is little danger, I suppose, of our falling again into the strange excesses of superstition to which it led.  But if I have not much sympathy with modern imitations of medieval art, still less can I sympathise with that narrow puritanical jealousy which holds the monuments of a real and earnest faith in contempt:  all that God has permitted to exist once in the past should be considered as the possession of the present; sacred for example or warning, and held as the foundation on which to build up what is better and purer.—­Introd. p. xx.