n some way influenced
and affected by the fall, and that not in any way of degradation, for
the renewing in the divinity of Christ is a nobler condition than ever
that of Paradise, and yet throughout eternity it must imply and refer to
the disobedience, and the corrupt state of sin and death, and the
suffering of Christ himself, which can we conceive of any redeemed soul
as for an instant forgetting, or as remembering without sorrow? Neither
are the alternations of joy and such sorrow as by us is inconceivable,
being only as it were a softness and silence in the pulse of an infinite
felicity, inconsistent with the state even of the unfallen, for the
angels who rejoice over repentance cannot but feel an uncomprehended
pain as they try and try again in vain, whether they may not warm hard
hearts with the brooding of their kind wings. So that we have not to
banish from the ideal countenance the evidences of sorrow, nor of past
suffering, nor even of past and conquered sin, but only the immediate
operation of any evil, or the immediate coldness and hollowness of any
good emotion. And hence in that contest before noted, between the body
and the soul, we may often have to indicate the body as far conquered
and outworn, and with signs of hard struggle and bitter pain upon it,
and yet without ever diminishing the purity of its ideal; and because it
is not in the power of any human imagination to reason out or conceive
the countless modifications of experience, suffering, and separated
feeling, which have modelled and written their indelible images in
various order upon every human countenance, so no right ideal can be
reached by any combination of feature nor by any moulding and melting of
individual beauties together, and still less without model or example
conceived; but there is a perfect ideal to be wrought out of _every_
face around us that has on its forehead the writing and the seal of the
angel ascending from the East,[38] by the earnest study and penetration
of the written history thereupon, and the banishing of the blots and
stains, wherein we still see in all that is human, the visible and
instant operation of unconquered sin.

Sec. 13. Ideal form is only to be obtained by portraiture.

Now I see not how any of the steps of the argument by which we have
arrived at this conclusion can be evaded, and yet it would be difficult
to state anything more directly opposite to the usual teaching and
practice of artists. It