ing armed from the head. We are only
with the help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth
of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols: but I may note rapidly,
that her aegis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she
often, in the best statues, is represented as folding up her left
hand, for better guard; and the Gorgon, on her shield, are both
representative mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men
to stone, as it were), of the outmost and superficial spheres of
knowledge--that knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness,
and sorrow, the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the
child. For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension,
danger, and disdain; but from perfect knowledge, given by the
full-revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign of which she is
crowned with the olive spray, and bears the resistless spear.[213]

This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity; and every habit
of life, and every form of his art developed themselves from the
seeking this bright, serene, resistless wisdom; and setting himself,
as a man, to do things evermore rightly and strongly;[214] not with
any ardent affection or ultimate hope; but with a resolute and
continent energy of will, as knowing that for failure there was no
consolation, and for sin there was no remission. And the Greek
architecture rose unerring, bright, clearly defined, and
self-contained.

Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which was
essentially the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine is the
remission of sins; for which cause, it happens, too often, in certain
phases of Christianity, that sin and sickness themselves are partly
glorified, as if, the more you had to be healed of, the more divine
was the healing. The practical result of this doctrine, in art, is a
continual contemplation of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of
purification from them; thus we have an architecture conceived in a
mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, partly severe, partly
luxuriant, which will bend itself to every one of our needs, and every
one of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or
weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, when base
people build it--of all, the noblest, when built by the noble.

And now note that both these religions--Greek and Mediaeval--perished
by falsehood in their own main purpose. The Greek religion of Wisd