they defy us or any honest man not to admire. They are
reading the old legends, and when we call them superstitious--they
grant it, and then produce passages in which the highest doctrines of
Christianity are embodied in the most pathetic and noble stories.
They are looking for themselves at the ante-Raphaellic artists, and
when we tell them that Fra Angelico's pictures are weak, affected,
ill-drawn, ill-coloured--they grant it, and then ask us if we can
deny the sweetness, the purity, the rapt devotion, the saintly
virtue, which shines forth from his faces. They ask us how beautiful
and holy words or figures can be inspired by an evil spirit. They
ask us why they are to deny the excellence of tales and pictures
which make men more pure and humble, more earnest and noble. They
tell us truly that all beauty is God's stamp, and that all beauty
ought to be consecrated to his service. And then they ask us: "If
Protestantism denies that she can consecrate the beautiful, how can
you wonder if we love the Romanism which can? You say that Popery
created these glorious schools of art; how can you wonder if, like
Overbeck, "we take the faith for the sake of the art which it
inspired?"

To all which, be it true or false (and it is both), are we to answer
merely by shutting our eyes and ears tight, and yelling "No Popery!"
or are we to say boldly to them: "We confess ourselves in fault; we
sympathise with your longings; we confess that Protestantism has not
satisfied them; but we assert that the only cause is, that
Protestantism has not been true to herself; that Art, like every
other product of the free human spirit, is her domain and not
Popery's; that these legends, these pictures, are beautiful just in
as far as they contain in them the germs of those eternal truths
about man, nature, and God, which the Reformation delivered from
bondage; that you can admire them, and yet remain thorough
Protestants; and more, that unless you do remain Protestants, you
will never enter into their full beauty and significance, because you
will lose sight of those very facts and ideas from which they derive
all their healthy power over you"?

These thoughts are not our own; they are uttered all over England,
thank God! just now, by many voices and in many forms; if they had
been boldly spoken during the last fifteen years, many a noble
spirit, we believe, might have remained in the Church of its fathers
which has now taken refuge in Ro