m. Then
people began to see again that Symbolism was the underlying
spirit of Art--as they had known perfectly well, of course, in
medieval days: that Art consisted in going beneath the material
surfaces that reflected light, or the material events that
happened, in painting and literature respectively, and, by a
process of selection, of symbolizing (not photographically
representing) the Ideas beneath the Things--the Substance beneath
the Accidents--the Thought beneath the Expression--(you can call
it what you like). Zola in literature, Strauss in music, the
French school of painting--these reduced Realism _ad absurdum_.
Thus once more the Catholic Church, in this as in everything
else, was discovered to have possessed the secret all along. The
Symbolic Reaction therefore began, and all our music, all our
painting, and all our literature to-day are frankly and
confessedly Symbolic--that is, Catholic. And this too, you see,
pointed to the same lesson as Psychology, that beneath phenomena
there was a Force which transcended phenomena; and that the
Church had dealt with this Force, knowing It to be Personal,
through all her history.

"Finally--and this was the crowning argument of all, that
correlated all the rest--there was the growing scientific and
popular perception of the Recuperative Power of the Church--that
which our Divine Lord Himself called the Sign of the Prophet
Jonas, or Resurrection.

"There were of course countless other lines of advance, in
practically every science, and they all pointed in the same
direction, and met, so to speak, from every quarter of the
compass the end of the tunnel which the Church had been boring
through all the heaped-up stupidities and ignorances of man.
Psychology tunnelled, and presently heard the voices of the
exorcists and the echoes of Lourdes through the darkness. Human
religions tunnelled--Hinduism with its idea of a Divine
Incarnation, Buddhism with its coarse apprehension of the Eternal
Peace of a Beatific Vision, North American Religion with its
guesses at Sacramentalism, Savage Religion with its caricature of
a Bloody Sacrifice; all from various points; and presently heard
through the tumult the historical dogma of the Incarnation of
Christ, the dogma of Eternal Life, the Sacramental System and the
Sacrifice of the Cross--all proclaimed in one coherent and
perfectly philosophical Creed. Ideals of Social Reform met with
the same experiences. The Socialist with his