he
metaphysicians are always an offence and a mockery to the
religious consciousness. There is here, too, a bare possibility that
some one of these absolutes may be a representation of the truth;
but the method by which this representation is acquired is violent
and artificial; while the traditional conception of God is the
spontaneous embodiment of passionate contemplation and long
experience.

As the God of religion differs from that of metaphysics, so does
the Christ of tradition differ from that of our critical historians.
Even if we took the literal narrative of the Gospels and accepted it
as all we could know of Christ, without allowing ourselves any
imaginative interpretation of the central figure, we should get an
ideal of him, I will not say very different from that of St. Francis or
St. Theresa, but even from that of the English, prayer-book. The
Christ men have loved and adored is an ideal of their own hearts,
the construction of an ever-present personality, living and
intimately understood, out of the fragments of story and doctrine
connected with a name. This subjective image has inspired all the
prayers, all the conversions, all the penances, charities, and
sacrifices, as well as half the art of the Christian world.

The Virgin Mary, whose legend is so meagre, but whose power
over the Catholic imagination is so great, is an even clearer
illustration of this inward building up of an ideal form. Everything
is here spontaneous sympathetic expansion of two given events:
the incarnation and the crucifixion. The figure of the Virgin, found
in these mighty scenes, is gradually clarified and developed, until
we come to the thought on the one hand of her freedom from
original sin, and on the other to that of her universal maternity. We
thus attain the conception of one of the noblest of conceivable
roles and of one of the most beautiful of characters. It is a pity that
a foolish iconoclasm should so long have deprived the Protestant
mind of the contemplation of this ideal.

Perhaps it is a sign of the average imaginative dulness or fatigue of
certain races and epochs that they so readily abandon these
supreme creations. For, if we are hopeful, why should we not
believe that the best we can fancy is also the truest; and if we are
distrustful in general of our prophetic gifts, why should we cling
only to the most mean and formless of our illusions? From the
beginning to the end of our perceptive and imaginative