About this period Scheffer seems to have wandered a little from the true mission of Art, and to have esteemed it her province to represent abstract theological truths.  His religious feeling seems to have become morbid, and his natural melancholy intensified.  The death of his wife, and consequent loneliness, may have given this ascetic tinge to his feelings.  But we must acknowledge, if it were so, that the sorrow which oppressed did not embitter his heart, and that a brave and humane spirit appears even in those works which have the least artistic merit to recommend them.  The “Christus Consolator” is the best known of this class of pictures.  It is cold, abstract, and inharmonious; but its religious spirit and the beautiful truth which it expresses have won for it a welcome which it seems hardly to merit.  Yet it has touching beauty in the separate figures.  The woman who leans so trustingly on her Saviour’s arm has a very high and holy face, whose type we recognize in more than one of his pictures; and the mother and her dead child form a very touching group.  But the various persons are not connected by any common story or mutual relation, and we feel a want of unity in the whole work.  Perhaps the strongest tribute to its power of expression is the story, that religious publishers found it necessary to blot out the figure of the slave who takes his place among the recipients of Christ’s blessing, in order to fit their reprint for a Southern market.  As a companion to it, he painted the “Christus Remunerator,” which is less interesting.  To this same class of pictures we should probably refer “The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven,” which we have never seen, but which is thus described by M. Anatole de la Lorge:—­

“There are also treasures of disappointed pleasure and of bitterness in this picture of ’The Lamentations of Earth to Heaven,’—­dim symbol of human suffering.  How does one, in the presence of this poem, feel filled with the spirit of St. Augustine, the nothingness of what we call joy, happiness, glory, here below,—­delights of a moment, which at most only aid us to traverse in a dream this valley of tears!  Certain pages of ‘The City of God,’ funeral prayers of Bossuet, can alone serve us for a comparison, in order to express the effect produced upon those who have visited this chef d’oeuvre in Ary Scheffer’s atelier.  Before producing it, the artist must have thought long, suffered long; for each stroke of the pencil seems to hide a grief, each figure speaks to you in passing, and utters a complaint, a sigh, a prayer,—­sad echoes of the despair of life!  The religious tendency of the thinker is here fully shown; his poetic sympathy, his aspirations, his dreams, have found a free course.  We must mark, also, with what freedom his lamentations spring from the ground, to carry even to the feet of the Creator the overwhelming weight of earthly woe.  Ary Scheffer’s picture is like the epitaph destined some day for the obsequies