the Arts of Northern and Southern Europe stand exactly
opposed. The Northern temper never accepts the Catholic faith with force
such as it reached in Italy. Our sincerest thirteenth-century sculptor
is cold and formal compared with that of the Pisani; nor can any
Northern poet be set for an instant beside Dante, as an exponent of
Catholic faith: on the contrary, the Northern temper accepts the
scholarship of the Reformation with absolute sincerity, while the
Italians seek refuge from it in the partly scientific and completely
lascivious enthusiasms of literature and painting, renewed under
classical influence. We therefore, in the north, produce our Shakspeare
and Holbein; they their Petrarch and Raphael. And it is nearly
impossible for you to study Shakspeare or Holbein too much, or Petrarch
and Raphael too little.

I do not say this, observe, in opposition to the Catholic faith, or to
any other faith, but only to the attempts to support whatsoever the
faith may be, by ornament or eloquence, instead of action. Every man who
honestly accepts, and acts upon, the knowledge granted to him by the
circumstances of his time, has the faith which God intends him to
have;--assuredly a good one, whatever the terms or form of it--every man
who dishonestly refuses, or interestedly disobeys the knowledge open to
him, holds a faith which God does not mean him to hold, and therefore a
bad one, however beautiful or traditionally respectable.

215. Do not, therefore, I entreat you, think that I speak with any
purpose of defending one system of theology against another; least of
all, reformed against Catholic theology. There probably never was a
system of religion so destructive to the loveliest arts and the
loveliest virtues of men, as the modern Protestantism, which consists in
an assured belief in the Divine forgiveness of all your sins, and the
Divine correctness of all your opinions. But in the first searching and
sincere activities, the doctrines of the Reformation produced the most
instructive art, and the grandest literature, yet given to the world;
while Italy, in her interested resistance to those doctrines, polluted
and exhausted the arts she already possessed. Her iridescence of dying
statesmanship--her magnificence of hollow piety,--were represented in
the arts of Venice and Florence by two mighty men on either side--Titian
and Tintoret,--Michael Angelo and Raphael. Of the calm and brave
statesmanship, the modest and faithf