strust of plastic art. The spirit of Christianity and
the spirit of figurative art are opposed, not because such art is immoral,
but because it cannot free itself from sensuous associations[4]. It is
always bringing us back to the dear life of earth, from which the faith
would sever us. It is always reminding us of the body which piety bids us
to forget. Painters and sculptors glorify that which saints and ascetics
have mortified. The masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example,
lead the soul away from compunction, away from penitence, away from
worship even, to dwell on the delight of youthful faces, blooming colour,
graceful movement, delicate emotion[5]. Nor is this all: religious motives
may be misused for what is worse than merely sensuous suggestiveness. The
masterpieces of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they pretend
to quicken compassion for martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial
blood-lust lurking in the darkest chambers of the soul[6]. Therefore it is
that piety, whether the piety of monastic Italy or of Puritan England,
turns from these aesthetic triumphs as from something alien to itself. When
the worshipper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite,
ineffable, unrealised, how can he endure the contact of those splendid
forms, in which the lust of the eye and the pride of life, professing to
subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the goodliness of sensual
existence? Art, by magnifying human beauty, contradicts these Pauline
maxims: "For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain;" "Set your
affections on things above, not on things on earth;" "Your life is hid
with Christ in God." The sublimity and elevation it gives to carnal
loveliness are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds no truce or
compromise of traffic with the flesh. As displayed in its most perfect
phases, in Greek sculpture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual
mundane life of man; but Christ, in the language of uncompromising piety,
means everything most alien to this mundane life--self-denial, abstinence
from fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond the grave,
seclusion even from social and domestic ties. "He that loveth father and
mother more than me, is not worthy of me," "He that taketh not his cross
and followeth me, is not worthy of me." It is needful to insist upon these
extremest sentences of the New Testament, because upon them was based the
religious practice of the Middl