But there is a pretension to more than technical excellence in the mythological works; there is a declaration of physical beauty in the very idea; in both these and the Scriptural there is an assumption of historical value.

While we believe that the problem of physical beauty can be solved and demonstrated, and the representations of Venus can be proved to possess or to lack the beautiful, we choose to leave now, as we should be compelled to do after discussion, the decision of the question to those who raise it.  It is of little avail to prove a work of art beautiful,—­of less, to prove it ugly.  Spectators and generations cannot be taken one by one and convinced.  But where the operation of judgment is from the reasoning rather than from the intuitive nature, facts, opinions, and impressions may exert healthful influences.

The Venus of Page we cannot accept,—­not because it may be unbeautiful, for that might be but a shortcoming,—­not because of any technical failure, for, with the exception of weakness in the character of waves, nothing can be finer,—­not because it lacks elevated sentiment, for this Venus was not the celestial,—­but because it has nothing to do with the present, neither is it of the past, nor related in any wise to any imaginable future.

The present has no ideal of which the Venus of the ancients is a manifestation.  Other creations of that marvellous Greek mind might be fitly used to symbolize phases of the present.  Hercules might labor now; there are other stables than the Augean; and not yet are all Hydras slain.  Armor is needed; and a Vulcan spirit is making the anvil ring beneath the earth-crust of humanity.  But Venus, the voluptuous, the wanton,—­no sensuousness pervading any religion of this era finds in her its fitting type and sign.  She, her companions, and her paramours, with the magnificent religion which evolved them, were entombed centuries ago; and no angel has rolled the stone from the door of their sepulchre.  They are dead; the necessity which called the Deistic ideal into existence is dead; the ideal itself is dead, since Paul preached in Athens its funeral sermon.

As history of past conditions, no value can be attached to representations produced in subsequent ages.  In this respect all these pictures must be false.  The best can only approximate truth.  Yet his two pictures of Scriptural subjects—­one from the remoteness of Hebrew antiquity, the other from the early days of Christianity—­are most valuable even as history:  not the history of the flight from Egypt, nor that of the flight into Egypt, but the history of what these mighty events have become after the lapse of many centuries.

Herein lies the difference between Mythology and Christianity:  the one arose, culminated, and perished, soul and body, when the shadow of the Cross fell athwart Olympus; the other is immortal,—­immortal as is Christ, immortal as are human souls, of which it is the life.  No century has been when it has not found, and no century can be when it will not find, audible and visible utterance.  The music of the “Messiah” reveals the relation of its age to the great central idea of Christianity.  Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Bach, Milton, Overbeck, were the revelators of human elevation, as sustained by the philosophy of which Christ was the great interpreter.