od to man, "in whom," according to the oldest
version of the angelic message, "He is well-pleased."

For what Christianity did many centuries afterwards in the way of
informing an art, a poetry, of graver and higher beauty, we may think,
than that of Greek art and poetry at their best, was in truth
conformable to the original tendency of its genius. The genuine
capacity of the catholic church in this direction, discoverable from
the first in the New Testament, was also really at work, in that
earlier "Peace," under [118] the Antonines--the minor "Peace of the
church," as we might call it, in distinction from the final "Peace of
the church," commonly so called, under Constantine. Saint Francis,
with his following in the sphere of poetry and of the arts--the voice
of Dante, the hand of Giotto--giving visible feature and colour, and a
palpable place among men, to the regenerate race, did but re-establish
a continuity, only suspended in part by those troublous intervening
centuries--the "dark ages," properly thus named--with the gracious
spirit of the primitive church, as manifested in that first early
springtide of her success. The greater "Peace" of Constantine, on the
other hand, in many ways, does but establish the exclusiveness, the
puritanism, the ascetic gloom which, in the period between Aurelius and
the first Christian emperor, characterised a church under
misunderstanding or oppression, driven back, in a world of tasteless
controversy, inwards upon herself.

Already, in the reign of Antoninus Pius, the time was gone by when men
became Christians under some sudden and overpowering impression, and
with all the disturbing results of such a crisis. At this period the
larger number, perhaps, had been born Christians, had been ever with
peaceful hearts in their "Father's house." That earlier belief in the
speedy coming of judgment and of the end of the world, with the
consequences it so naturally involved in the temper [119] of men's
minds, was dying out. Every day the contrast between the church and
the world was becoming less pronounced. And now also, as the church
rested awhile from opposition, that rapid self-development outward from
within, proper to times of peace, was in progress. Antoninus Pius, it
might seem, more truly even than Marcus Aurelius himself, was of that
group of pagan saints for whom Dante, like Augustine, has provided in
his scheme of the house with many mansions. A sincere old Roman piet