hings mighty, the artist,
if he desires to inform the people thoroughly, must imitate Christ,
and, like him, stoop down to earth and become flesh of their flesh;
and his work should be wrought out with all his soul and strength in
the same world-broad charity, and truth, and virtue, and be, for
himself as well as for them, a justification for his teaching. But
all art, simply because it is pure and perfect, cannot, for those
grounds alone, be called sacred: Christian, it may, and that justly;
for only since Christ taught have morals been considered a religion.
Christian and sacred art bear that relation to each other that the
circle bears to its generating point; the first is only volume, the
last is power: and though the first--as the world includes
God--includes with it the last, still, the last is the greatest, for
it makes that which includes it: thus all pure art is Christian, but
not all is sacred. Christian art comprises the earth and its
humanities, and, by implication, God and Christ also; and sacred art
is the emanating idea--the central causating power--the jasper
throne, whereon sits Christ, surrounded by the prophets, apostles,
and saints, administering judgement, wisdom, and holiness. In this
sense, then, the art you would call sacred is not sacred, but
Christian: and, as _all perfect art is Christian_, regeneration
necessarily can only flow thence; and thus it is, as you say, that,
from whatever quarter the artist steers his course, he steers aright.

_Kosmon._ And, Christian, is a return to this sacred or Christian art
by you deemed possible? I question it. How can you get the art of one
age to reflect that of another, when the image to be reflected is
without the angle of reflection? The sun cannot be seen of us when it
is night! and that class of art has got its golden age too
remote--its night too long set--for it to hope ever to grasp rule
again, or again to see its day break upon it. You have likened art to
a river rising pure, and rolling a turbid volume into the ocean. I
have a comparison equally just. The career of one artist contains in
itself the whole of art-history; its every phase is presented by him
in the course of his life. Savage art is beheld in his childish
scratchings and barbarous glimmerings; Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian
art in his boyish rigidity and crude fixedness of idea and purpose;
Mediaeval, or pre-Raffaelle art is seen in his youthful timid
darings, his unripe fancies osc