reative Being is thus represented sometimes as the third person of
the Trinity, in the form of a dove brooding over chaos; sometimes as the
second person, and therefore a youth; sometimes as the first person,
and therefore fatherly and venerable; sometimes as the first and second
persons, one being venerable and the other youthful; and sometimes
as three persons, one venerable and one youthful, both wearing papal
crowns, and each holding in his lips a tip of the wing of the dove,
which thus seems to proceed from both and to be suspended between them.

Nor was this the most complete development of the medieval idea. The
Creator was sometimes represented with a single body, but with three
faces, thus showing that Christian belief had in some pious minds gone
through substantially the same cycle which an earlier form of belief had
made ages before in India, when the Supreme Being was represented with
one body but with the three faces of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva.

But at the beginning of the modern period the older view in its
primitive Jewish form was impressed upon Christians by the most mighty
genius in art the world has known; for in 1512, after four years of
Titanic labour, Michael Angelo uncovered his frescoes within the vault
of the Sistine Chapel.

They had been executed by the command and under the sanction of the
ruling Pope, Julius II, to represent the conception of Christian
theology then dominant, and they remain to-day in all their majesty
to show the highest point ever attained by the older thought upon the
origin of the visible universe.

In the midst of the expanse of heaven the Almighty Father--the first
person of the Trinity--in human form, august and venerable, attended by
angels and upborne by mighty winds, sweeps over the abyss, and, moving
through successive compartments of the great vault, accomplishes the
work of the creative days. With a simple gesture he divides the light
from the darkness, rears on high the solid firmament, gathers together
beneath it the seas, or summons into existence the sun, moon, and
planets, and sets them circling about the earth.

In this sublime work culminated the thought of thousands of years; the
strongest minds accepted it or pretended to accept it, and nearly two
centuries later this conception, in accordance with the first of the
two accounts given in Genesis, was especially enforced by Bossuet,
and received a new lease of life in the Church, both Catholic and