mummy-like statues, which, in their corpse-like immobility, seem
struck with eternal death, or in slowly detaching themselves in
their vast and unfinished forms from primeval and gigantic rocks,
grow into a kind of dull, embryonic, and stagnant life, far more
abhorrent than death itself--do we not clearly recognize the idea
of the infinite absorbing all things into itself, crushing the
soaring spirit of man under a blind fatalism, robbing him of all
hope and aim in life, of the dignity of personal effort and moral
responsibility, presenting as the only aim of all his glowing
desires, the utter absorption of his own individuality in the bosom
of the limitless whole--thus reducing the vivid action of his
varied life to the stillness of the grave, without its repose?'

It is a strange fact, which we will view more closely when we treat of
Unity, that the quest for variety which led men into polytheism, or the
fractioning of the Deity into false and wicked gods and goddesses,
necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter
himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the
imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, man was
yet forced to submit to its irrational and pitiless decrees) than was
even the hopeless fatalism consequent upon the pantheistic absorption of
the East.

What a step from the vague yet crushing, abstract yet deadening dreaming
of a fearful and misinterpreted infinite; from the cruel rigors of an
unreasoning and implacable fate--to that full revelation that the
Infinite is a _personal_ God, cognizant of the human, gifting it with a
free will to choose good or evil, and united with it in mercy and love
through the mystic life and still more mystic death of the Divine
Redeemer!

In sculpture, the thirst for the infinite is manifest in the various
statues of the gods which it has given us; in painting, an art more
closely related to Christianity, in the numberless figures of angels and
heads of cherubs, in the countless pictures upon holy subjects with
which it has presented us. The marble speaks, the canvas glows with
human aspirations toward the infinite.

It is certainly a very significant fact, too, that there must be a point
of escape in every picture, a window to let in the light, a glimpse of
the sky: an idea of _distance_ must in some way be given, or the
painting will oppress us like