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II. MEMORIAL STUDIES OF ST. MARK’S 415
copied from that of the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the opposing lions or phœnixes of its sculptures from the treasury of Atreus and the citadel of Tyre.
4. Thus, beyond all measure of value as a treasury of art, it is also, beyond all other volumes, venerable as a codex of religion. Just as the white foliage and birds on their golden ground are descendants, in direct line, from the ivory and gold of Phidias, so the Greek pictures and inscriptions, whether in mosaic or sculpture, throughout the building, record the unbroken unity of spiritual influence from the Father of light-or the races whose own poets had said “We also are his offspring”1-down to the day when all their gods, not slain, but changed into new creatures, became the types to them of the mightier Christian spirits; and Perseus became St. George, and Mars St. Michael, and Athena the Madonna, and Zeus their revealed Father in Heaven.
In all the history of human mind, there is nothing so wonderful, nothing so eventful, as this spiritual change. So inextricably is it interwoven with the most divine, the most distant threads of human thought and effort, that, while none of the thoughts of St. Paul or the visions of St. John can be understood without our understanding first the imagery familiar to the Pagan worship of the Greeks, on the other hand no understanding of the real purport of Greek religion can be securely reached without watching the translation of its myths into the message of Christianity.
5. Both by the natural temper of my mind, and by the labour of forty years given to this subject in its practical issues on the present state of Christendom, I have become, in some measure, able both to show and to interpret these most precious sculptures; and my health has been so far given back to me that if I am at this moment aided, it will, so far as I can judge, be easily possible for me to complete the work so long in preparation. There will yet, I doubt
1 [Acts xvii. 28, the references there being to Aratus and Cleanthes.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
