“THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ART” 181

ought rather to surrender something of the fulness which his own faith perceives, than expose the fabric of his vision, too finely woven, to the hard handling of the materialist; and we sincerely regret that discredit is likely to accrue to portions of our author’s well-grounded statement of real significances, once of all men understood, because these are rashly blended with his own accidental perceptions of disputable analogy. He perpetually associates the present imaginative influence of Art with its ancient hieroglyphical teaching, and mingles fancies fit only for the framework of a sonnet, with the deciphered evidence which is to establish a serious point of history; and this the more frequently and grossly, in the endeavour to force every branch of his subject into illustration of the false division of the mental attributes which we have pointed out.

12. His theory is first clearly stated in the following passage:-

“Man is, in the strictest sense of the word, a progressive being, and with many periods of inaction and retrogression, has still held, upon the whole, a steady course towards the great end of his existence, the re-union and re-harmonizing of the three elements of his being, dislocated by the Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these three elements, Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, has had its distinct development at three distant intervals, and in the personality of the three great branches of the human family. The race of Ham, giants in prowess if not in stature, cleared the earth of primeval forests and monsters, built cities, established vast empires, invented the mechanical arts, and gave the fullest expansion to the animal energies. After them, the Greeks, the elder line of Japhet, developed the intellectual faculties, Imagination and Reason, more especially the former, always the earlier to bud and blossom; poetry and fiction, history, philosophy, and science, alike look back to Greece as their birthplace; on the one hand they put a soul into Sense, peopling the world with their gay mythology-on the other they bequeathed to us, in Plato and Aristotle, the mighty patriarchs of human wisdom, the Darius and the Alexander of the two grand armies of thinking men whose antagonism has ever since divided the battle-field of the human intellect:-While, lastly, the race of Shem, the Jews, and the nations of Christendom, their locum tenentes as the Spiritual Israel, have, by God’s blessing, been elevated in Spirit to as near and intimate communion with Deity as is possible in this stage of being. Now the peculiar interest and dignity of Art consists in her exact correspondence in her three departments with these three periods of development, and in the illustration she thus affords-more closely and markedly even than literature-to the all-important truth that men stand or fall according as they look up to the

[Version 0.04: March 2008]