even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming colour, graceful movement, delicate emotion[5].  Nor is this all:  religious motives may be misused for what is worse than merely sensuous suggestiveness.  The masterpieces of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they pretend to quicken compassion for martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial blood-lust lurking in the darkest chambers of the soul[6].  Therefore it is that piety, whether the piety of monastic Italy or of Puritan England, turns from these aesthetic triumphs as from something alien to itself.  When the worshipper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite, ineffable, unrealised, how can he endure the contact of those splendid forms, in which the lust of the eye and the pride of life, professing to subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the goodliness of sensual existence?  Art, by magnifying human beauty, contradicts these Pauline maxims:  “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain;” “Set your affections on things above, not on things on earth;” “Your life is hid with Christ in God.”  The sublimity and elevation it gives to carnal loveliness are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds no truce or compromise of traffic with the flesh.  As displayed in its most perfect phases, in Greek sculpture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual mundane life of man; but Christ, in the language of uncompromising piety, means everything most alien to this mundane life—­self-denial, abstinence from fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond the grave, seclusion even from social and domestic ties.  “He that loveth father and mother more than me, is not worthy of me,” “He that taketh not his cross and followeth me, is not worthy of me.”  It is needful to insist upon these extremest sentences of the New Testament, because upon them was based the religious practice of the Middle Ages, more sincere in their determination to fulfil the letter and embrace the spirit of the Gospel than any succeeding age has been.[7]

If, then, there really exists this antagonism between fine art glorifying human life and piety contemning it, how came it, we may ask, that even in the Middle Ages the Church hailed art as her coadjutor?  The answer lies in this, that the Church has always compromised.  The movement of the modern world, upon the close of the Middle Ages, offered the Church a compromise, which it would have been difficult to refuse, and in which she perceived art first no peril to her dogmas.  When the conflict of the first few centuries of Christianity had ended in her triumph, she began to mediate between asceticism and the world.  Intent on absorbing all existent elements of life and power, she conformed her system to the Roman type, established her service in basilicas and Pagan temples, adopted portions of the antique ritual, and converted local genii into saints.  At the same time she utilised the spiritual forces of monasticism, and turned the mystic impulse