And now, for the space of only six or seven summer days and nights, there raged a storm by which all these treasures were destroyed.  Nearly every one of these temples was entirely rifled of its contents; not for the purpose of plunder, but of destruction.  Hardly a province or a town escaped.  Art must forever weep over this bereavement; Humanity must regret that the reforming is thus always ready to degenerate into the destructive principle; but it is impossible to censure very severely the spirit which prompted the brutal, but not ferocious deed.  Those statues, associated as they were with the remorseless persecution which had so long desolated the provinces, had ceased to be images.  They had grown human and hateful, so that the people arose and devoted them to indiscriminate massacre.

No doubt the iconoclastic fury is to be regretted; for such treasures can scarcely be renewed.  The age for building and decorating great cathedrals is past.  Certainly, our own age, practical and benevolent, if less poetical, should occupy itself with the present, and project itself into the future.  It should render glory to God rather by causing wealth to fertilize the lowest valleys of humanity, than by rearing gorgeous temples where paupers are to kneel.  To clothe the naked, redeem the criminal, feed the hungry, less by alms and homilies than by preventive institutions and beneficent legislation; above all, by the diffusion of national education, to lift a race upon a level of culture hardly attained by a class in earlier times, is as lofty a task as to accumulate piles of ecclesiastical splendor.

It would be tedious to recount in detail the events which characterized the remarkable image-breaking in the Netherlands.  As Antwerp was the central point in these transactions, and as there was more wealth and magnificence in the great cathedral of that city than in any church of northern Europe, it is necessary to give a rapid outline of the events which occurred there.  From its exhibition in that place the spirit every where will best be shown.

The Church of Our Lady, which Philip had so recently converted into a cathedral, dated from the year 1124, although it may be more fairly considered a work of the fourteenth century.  Its college of canons had been founded in another locality by Godfrey of Bouillon.  The Brabantine hero, who so romantically incarnates the religious poetry of his age, who first mounted the walls of redeemed Jerusalem, and was its first Christian monarch, but who refused to accept a golden diadem on the spot where the Saviour had been crowned with thorns; the Fleming who lived and was the epic which the great Italian, centuries afterwards; translated into immortal verse, is thus fitly associated with the beautiful architectural poem which was to grace his ancestral realms.  The body of the church, the interior and graceful perspectives of which were not liable to the reproach brought against many