nd during the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. Many were filled with paintings from a school which had
precedence in time and merit over its sister nurseries of art in Germany.
All were peopled with statues. All were filled with profusely-adorned
chapels, for the churches had been enriched generation after generation
by wealthy penitence, which had thus purchased absolution for crime and
smoothed a pathway to heaven.

And now, for the space of only six or seven summer days and nights, there
raged a storm by which all these treasures were destroyed. Nearly every
one of these temples was entirely rifled of its contents; not for the
purpose of plunder, but of destruction. Hardly a province or a town
escaped. Art must forever weep over this bereavement; Humanity must
regret that the reforming is thus always ready to degenerate into the
destructive principle; but it is impossible to censure very severely the
spirit which prompted the brutal, but not ferocious deed. Those statues,
associated as they were with the remorseless persecution which had so
long desolated the provinces, had ceased to be images. They had grown
human and hateful, so that the people arose and devoted them to
indiscriminate massacre.

No doubt the iconoclastic fury is to be regretted; for such treasures can
scarcely be renewed. The age for building and decorating great cathedrals
is past. Certainly, our own age, practical and benevolent, if less
poetical, should occupy itself with the present, and project itself into
the future. It should render glory to God rather by causing wealth to
fertilize the lowest valleys of humanity, than by rearing gorgeous
temples where paupers are to kneel. To clothe the naked, redeem the
criminal, feed the hungry, less by alms and homilies than by preventive
institutions and beneficent legislation; above all, by the diffusion of
national education, to lift a race upon a level of culture hardly
attained by a class in earlier times, is as lofty a task as to accumulate
piles of ecclesiastical splendor.

It would be tedious to recount in detail the events which characterized
the remarkable image-breaking in the Netherlands. As Antwerp was the
central point in these transactions, and as there was more wealth and
magnificence in the great cathedral of that city than in any church of
northern Europe, it is necessary to give a rapid outline of the events
which occurred there. From its exhibition in that place the spirit every