ds of thinking
men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human
culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical. Without being as conscious
of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to
the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be
effected. Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for
the modern synthesis. All that aesthetic handling, in this region more
precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do
towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts.
Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than
philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino. A new Catholicity, a
cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures.
It lay outside his power, or that of any other artist, to do more than to
extract from both revelations the elements of plastic beauty they
contained, and to show how freely he could use them for a common purpose.
Nothing but the scientific method can in the long run enable us to reach
that further point, outside both Christianity and Paganism, at which the
classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored
to the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, perchance, is the
religion, still unborn or undeveloped, whereof Joachim of Flora dimly
prophesied when he said that the kingdom of the Father was past, the
kingdom of the Son was passing, and the kingdom of the Spirit was to be.
The essence of it is contained in the whole growth to usward of the human
mind; and though a creed so highly intellectualised as that will be, can
never receive adequate expression from the figurative arts, still the
painting of the sixteenth century forms for it, as it were, a not unworthy
vestibule. It does so, because it first succeeded in humanising the
religion of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming the true value of antique
paganism for the modern mind, and in making both subserve the purposes of
free and unimpeded art.

Meanwhile, at the moment when painting was about to be exhausted, a new
art had arisen, for which it remained, within the aesthetic sphere, to
achieve much that painting could not do. When the cycle of Christian ideas
had been accomplished by the painters, and when the first passion for
antiquity had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to express the
soul in all its manifold feeling and complexity of movement. In