, and illustrated the spirituality of the
converse of Moses and Elias with Christ concerning His decease which He
should accomplish at Jerusalem, by placing them, above the Mount of
Transfiguration, in the attitudes of two humming-birds on the top of a
honeysuckle.

240. But the best of these ornamental arrangements were insufficient to
sustain the vivacity, while they conclusively undermined the sincerity,
of the Christian faith, and "the real consequences of the acceptance of
this kind (Roman Bath and Sarcophagus kind)" of religious idealism were
instant and manifold.[45]

* * *

So far as it was received and trusted in by thoughtful persons, it only
served to chill all the conceptions of sacred history which they might
otherwise have obtained. Whatever they could have fancied for themselves
about the wild, strange, infinitely stern, infinitely tender, infinitely
varied veracities of the life of Christ, was blotted out by the vapid
fineries of Raphael: the rough Galilean pilot, the orderly custom
receiver, and all the questioning wonder and fire of uneducated
apostleship, were obscured under an antique mask of philosophical faces
and long robes. The feeble, subtle, suffering, ceaseless energy and
humiliation of St. Paul were confused with an idea of a meditative
Hercules leaning on a sweeping sword; and the mighty presences of Moses
and Elias were softened by introductions of delicate grace, adopted from
dancing nymphs and rising Auroras.

Now no vigorously minded religious person could possibly receive
pleasure or help from such art as this; and the necessary result was the
instant rejection of it by the healthy religion of the world. Raphael
ministered, with applause, to the impious luxury of the Vatican, but was
trampled underfoot at once by every believing and advancing Christian of
his own and subsequent times; and thenceforward pure Christianity and
"high art" took separate roads, and fared on, as best they might,
independently of each other.

But although Calvin, and Knox, and Luther, and their flocks, with all
the hardest-headed and truest-hearted faithful left in Christendom, thus
spurned away the spurious art, and all art with it (not without harm to
themselves, such as a man must needs sustain in cutting off a decayed
limb), certain conditions of weaker Christianity suffered the false
system to retain influence over them; and to this day the clear and
tasteless poison of the art of