esture of joy, they are really dead or
sleeping. Is it only sleep? Do they perhaps at night, when all the doors
of their prisons are barred and their gaolers are gone, praise God in
His Holiness, even in such a hell as this? Who knows? They were made for
a world so different, for a time that out of the love of God had seen
arise the very beauty of the world, and were glad therefor. Ah, of how
many beautiful things have we robbed God in our beggary! We have
imprisoned the praise of the artists in the museums that Science may
pass by and sneer; we have arranged the saints in order, and Madonna we
have carefully hidden under the glass, because now we never dream of God
or speak with Him at all. Art is dying, Beauty is become a burden,
Nature a thing for science and not for love. They are become too
precious, the old immortal things; we must hide them away lest they fade
and God take them from us: and because we have hidden them away, and
they are become too precious for life, and we have killed them because
we loved them, we seldom pass by where they are save to satisfy the
same curiosity that leads us to any other charnel-house where the dead
are exposed.

[Illustration: SINGING BOYS FROM THE CANTORIA OF LUCA DELLA ROBBIA

_In Opera del Duomo, Florence_

_Alinari_]

Thus they have stolen away the silver altar of the Baptistery, that
miracle of the fourteenth-century silversmiths, Betto di Geri, Leonardo
di Ser Giovanni, and the rest, that it may be a cause of wonder in a
museum. So a flower looks between the cold pages of a botanist's album,
so a bird sings in his case: for life is to do that for which we were
created, and if that be the praise of God in His sanctuary, to stand
impotently by under the gaze of innumerable unbelievers in a museum is
to die. And truly this is a shame in Italy that so many fair and lovely
things have been torn out of their places to be catalogued in a gallery.
It were a thousand times better that they were allowed to fade quietly
on the walls of the church where they were born. It is a vandalism only
possible to the modern world in which the machines have ground out every
human feeling and left us nothing but a bestial superstition which we
call science, and which threatens to become the worst tyranny of all,
that we should thus herd together, catalogue, describe, arrange, and
gape at every work of art and nature we can lay our hands on. No doubt
it brings in, directly and indirectly, an