ievous irony or good-natured sarcasm. The querulous wailings which
are the stock in trade of a certain class of writers are unnatural and
discordant sounds. We should expect rather a serene and cheerful melody
from a young and brave-hearted race, which is in intimate relations with
the external world. Instead of this, we have sucked in with the milk of
our Puritan mothers a forlorn and sorrowful spirit. We celebrate our
festivals with a sad countenance. We attempt to make merry by singing
dismal psalms. We weave our woes into poetry, and expand our
wretchedness in plaintive declamations.

This is a wide departure from the genius of Christianity, as well as
from the healthy instincts of humanity. In the first ages after Christ,
the newborn element of thought was a pure and beautiful spring, bubbling
up from the moss-grown ruins of the temple of heathendom. A hopeful,
joyous tone is indicated in the symbols of the early faith preserved in
the Vatican. It contained the germ of republican freedom and of a benign
and beneficent civilization. But it was driven by political convulsions
toward the East, and returned in the melancholy robes of the dreamy and
morbid oriental. It learned from Indian fakirs that laughter was a sin,
that misery was meritorious, that the hatred of beauty and joy was a
virtue in the sight of Heaven. The early Christians were imbued with the
sentiment of moral grandeur and loveliness; they represented Christ our
Lord as the fair ideal of humanity; but a darker age decreed that his
form should be meagre and homely--misled by those pagan Syrian pictures,
which still disfigure the churches in Russia, and whose original may be
found in the avatars of violence, modified by old Persian influence.
From the seventh to the twelfth century, the tendency to asceticism was
rampant. Beauty was proscribed as a temptation of the devil; deformed
and crooked limbs were ranked among the beatitudes; even dirt was
apotheosized, and, as a consequence, millions of men were mowed down by
unheard-of forms of disease. Humanity did not submit to this rule of
austerity and torture without a struggle. There was often a brave,
vigorous resistance. A lively protest was uttered in the joyous strains
of the troubadours and minnesingers. The glad spirit of nature could not
be wholly suppressed, and from amid the social oppressions of the times
sweet voices fell upon the ear, celebrating the praises of woman, the
love of beauty, and the