new force had not spent itself in six hundred years.  Another is that the revelation came to an age that was constantly breaking fresh ground.  Always there was a virgin tract at hand to take the seed and raise a lusty crop.  Between 500 and 1000 A.D. the population of Europe was fluid.  Some new race was always catching the inspiration and feeling and expressing it with primitive sensibility and passion.  The last to be infected was one of the finest; and in the eleventh century Norman power and French intelligence produced in the west of Europe a manifestation of the Christian ferment only a little inferior to that which five hundred years earlier had made glorious the East.

Let me insist once again that, when I speak of the Christian ferment or the Christian slope, I am not thinking of dogmatic religion.  I am thinking of that religious spirit of which Christianity, with its dogmas and rituals, is one manifestation, Buddhism another.  And when I speak of art as a manifestation of the religious spirit I do not mean that art expresses particular religious emotions, much less that it expresses anything theological.  I have said that if art expresses anything, it expresses an emotion felt for pure form and that which gives pure form its extraordinary significance.  So, when I speak of Christian art, I mean that this art was one product of that state of enthusiasm of which the Christian Church is another.  So far was the new spirit from being a mere ebullition of Christian faith that we find manifestations of it in Mohammedan art; everyone who has seen a photograph of the Mosque of Omar at Jerusalem knows that.  The emotional renaissance in Europe was not the wide-spreading of Christian doctrines, but it was through Christian doctrine that Europe came to know of the rediscovery of the emotional significance of the Universe.  Christian art is not an expression of specific Christian emotions; but it was only when men had been roused by Christianity that they began to feel the emotions that express themselves in form.  It was Christianity that put Europe into that state of emotional turmoil from which sprang Christian art.

For a moment, in the sixth century, the flood of enthusiasm seems to have carried the Eastern world, even the official world, off its feet.  But Byzantine officials were no fonder of swimming than others.  The men who worked the imperial machine, studied the Alexandrine poets, and dabbled in classical archaeology were not the men to look forward.  Only the people, led by the monks, were vaguely, and doubtless stupidly, on the side of emotion and the future.  Soon after Justinian’s death the Empire began to divide itself into two camps.  Appropriately, religious art was the standard of the popular party, and around that standard the battle raged.  “No man,” said Lord Melbourne, “has more respect for the Christian religion than I; but when it comes to dragging it into private life....”  At Constantinople they began dragging religion, and art too, into the