fulness of the new religion, which held so many sad and
pessimistic elements.

The classic spirit seemed to shudder before the eternity of the
individual, before the unfathomable depths which opened up for
mankind with this religion of the soul, which can find no rest in
itself, no peace in the world, unless it be at one with God in
self-forgetting devotion and surrender.

Solitude, to which all the deeper minds at this time paid homage,
became the mother of new and great thoughts, and of a view of the
world little behind the modern in sentimentality.

What Villemain says of the quotation from Gregory Nazianzen just
given, applies with equal force to the others:

No doubt there is a singular charm in this mixture of abstract
thoughts and emotions, this contrast between the beauties of
Nature and the unrest of a heart tormented by the enigma of
existence and seeking to find rest in faith.... It was not the
poetry of Homer, it was another poetry.... It was in the new form
of contemplative poetry, in this sadness of man about himself, in
these impulses towards God and the future, in this idealism so
little known by the poets of antiquity, that the Christian
imagination could compete without disadvantage. It was there that
that poetry arose which modern satiety seeks for, the poetry of
reverie and reflection, which penetrates man's heart and
deciphers his most intimate thoughts and vaguest wishes.

Contempt for art was a characteristic of the Fathers of the Church,
and to that end they extolled Nature; man's handiwork, however
dazzling, was but vanity in their eyes, whereas Nature was the
handiwork of the Creator. Culture and Nature were purposely set in
opposition to each other.[12] St Chrysostom wrote:

If the aspect of the colonnades of sumptuous buildings would lead
thy spirit astray, look upwards to the vault of heaven, and
around thee on the open fields, in which herds graze by the
water's side. Who does not despise all the creations of art, when
in the stillness of his soul he watches with admiration the
rising of the sun, as it pours its golden light over the face of
the earth; when resting on the thick grass beside the murmuring
spring, or beneath the sombre shade of a thick and leafy tree,
the eye rests on the far receding and hazy distance?

The visible to them was but a mirror of the invisible; as Paul says
(13th of the