of Truth,
as distinct from those of the Imagination,--if either the limits
or clearness of brief title had permitted me, I should have said,
_untransfigured_ truth;--meaning on the one side, truth which we have
not heart enough to transfigure, and on the other, truth of the lower
kind which is incapable of transfiguration. One may look at a girl
till one believes she is an angel; because, in the best of her, she
_is_ one; but one can't look at a cockchafer till one believes it is a
girl.

With this warning of the connection which exists between the honest
intellect and the healthy imagination; and using henceforward the
shorter word 'Fancy' for all inventive vision, I proceed to consider
with you the meaning and consequences of the frank and eager exertion
of the fancy on Religious subjects, between the twelfth and sixteenth
centuries.

Its first, and admittedly most questionable action, the promotion
of the group of martyr saints of the third century to thrones of
uncontested dominion in heaven, had better be distinctly understood,
before we debate of it, either with the Iconoclast or the Rationalist.
This apotheosis by the Imagination is the subject of my present
lecture. To-day I only describe it,--in my next lecture I will discuss
it.

Observe, however, that in giving such a history of the mental
constitution of nascent Christianity, we have to deal with, and
carefully to distinguish, two entirely different orders in its
accepted hierarchy:--one, scarcely founded at all on personal
characters or acts, but mythic or symbolic; often merely the revival,
the baptized resuscitation of a Pagan deity, or the personified
omnipresence of a Christian virtue;--the other, a senate of Patres
Conscripti of real persons, great in genius, and perfect, humanly
speaking, in holiness; who by their personal force and inspired
wisdom, wrought the plastic body of the Church into such noble form
as in each of their epochs it was able to receive; and on the right
understanding of whose lives, nor less of the affectionate traditions
which magnified and illumined their memories, must absolutely depend
the value of every estimate we form, whether of the nature of the
Christian Church herself, or of the directness of spiritual agency by
which she was guided.[24]

[Footnote 24: If the reader believes in no spiritual agency, still his
understanding of the first letters in the Alphabet of History depends
on his comprehending rightly the te