It is curious how, from time immemorial, man seems to have associated the idea of evil with beauty, shrunk from it with a sort of ghostly fear, while, at the same time drawn to it by force of its hypnotic attraction.  Strangely enough, beauty has been regarded as the most dangerous enemy of the soul, and the powers of darkness that are supposed to lie in wait for that frail and fluttering psyche, so precious and apparently so perishable, are usually represented as taking shapes of beguiling loveliness—­lamias, loreleis, wood nymphs, and witches with blue flowers for their eyes.  Lurking in its most innocent forms, the grim ascetic has affected to find a leaven of concupiscence, and whenever any reformation is afoot, it is always beauty that is made the first victim, whether it take the form of a statue, a stained-glass window, or a hair-ribbon.  “Homeliness is next to Godliness,” though not officially stated as an article of the Christian creed, has been one of the most active of all Christian tenets.  It has always been easier far for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a gloriously beautiful woman.  Presumably such a one might be in danger of corrupting the saints, somewhat unaccustomed to such apparitions.

In this Christian fear and hatred of beauty the democratic origin of the Christian religion is suggestively illustrated, for beauty, wherever found, is always mysteriously aristocratic, and thus instinctively excites the fear and jealousy of the common people.  When, in the third century, Christian mobs set about their vandalistic work of destroying the “Pagan” temples, tearing down the beautiful calm gods and goddesses from their pedestals, and breaking their exquisite marble limbs with brutish mallets, it was not, we may be sure, of the danger to their precious souls they were thinking, but of their patrician masters who had worshipped these fair images, and paid great sums to famous sculptors for such adornment of their sanctuaries.  Perhaps it was human enough, for to those mobs beauty had long been associated with oppression.  Yet how painful to picture those golden marbles, in all their immortal fairness, confronted with the hideousness of those fanatic ill-smelling multitudes.  Wonderful religionists, forsooth, that thus break with foolish hands and trample with swinish hoofs the sacred vessels of divine dreams.  Who would not

rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,—­
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.