cleft in the Andes, through which flows the river Funha, was
opened by a single blow of Nemqueteba, chief god of the Muyscas. In all
such and a hundred similar legends, easy to quote, we see the notion of
strength, brute force, muscular power, was that deemed most appropriate
to divinity, and that which he who would be godlike must most sedulously
seek. When filled with the god, the votary felt a surpassing vigor. The
Berserker fury was found in the wilds of America and Africa, as well as
among the Fiords. Sickness and weakness, on the contrary, were signs
that the gods were against him. Therefore, in all early stages of
culture, the office of priest and physician was one. Conciliation of the
gods was the catholicon.

Such deities were fearful to behold. They are represented as mighty of
stature and terrible of mien, calculated to appal, not attract, to
inspire fear, not to kindle love. In tropical America, in Egypt, in
Thibet, almost where you will, there is little to please the eye in the
pictures and statues of deities.

In Greece alone, a national temperament, marvellously sensitive to
symmetry, developed the combination of maximum strength with perfect
form in the sun-god, Apollo, and of grace with beauty in Aphrodite. The
Greeks were the apostles of the religion of beauty. Their philosophic
thought saw the permanent in the Form, which outlives strength, and is
that alone in which the race has being. In its transmission love is the
agent, and Aphrodite, unmatched in beauty and mother of love, was a
creation worthy of their devotion. Thus with them the religious
sentiment still sought its satisfaction in the individual, not indeed in
the muscle, but in the feature and expression.

When the old gods fell, the Christian fathers taught their flocks to
abhor the beautiful as one with the sensual. St. Clement of Alexandria
and Tertullian describe Christ as ugly of visage and undersized, a sort
of Socrates in appearance.[241-1] Christian art was long in getting
recognition. The heathens were the first to represent in picture and
statues Christ and the apostles, and for long the fathers of the church
opposed the multiplication of such images, saying that the inward beauty
was alone desirable. Christian art reached its highest inspiration under
the influence of Greek culture after the fall of Constantinople. In the
very year, however, that Rafaello Sanzio met his premature death, Luther
burned the decretals of the pope in