obscure land, who lived his life in circumstances of consistent lowliness and quietness in an out-of-the-way corner of the world, far from the highroads of its traffic, and who died a malefactor's shameful death. It is, at least, of some considerable importance to our outlook upon life to try to understand how this strange reversal came about. It surely has a good deal to tell us about the kind of world we live in and the way in which we should relate ourselves to it. Quite apart from the traditional teaching of the Church about Jesus, the bare facts of the historical consequences of His life and death and the total impression which He has made upon the minds of men through the ages since His coming require that we should make a serious effort to understand Him, even if it were only for the sake of informing ourselves about a striking historical phenomenon.

SUGGESTIONS FOR THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION

Was the inspiration of the Old Testament prophets different in kind from that of Savonarola? If so, in what way?

Is it reasonable to suppose that revelation ceased when the last book of the New Testament was written? If not, in what quarters are we likely to find traces or records of later revelations ?

What is the proper relation between the old and the new in thought? And what is the proper attitude to take towards them? If the old is not to be accepted without question, by what principles are we to judge it? How are we to test the new in order that we may know that it is true?

How far is it reasonable to believe that there is more to be known about the significance of Jesus than is known?

CHAPTER II

A General Survey

We have already observed that if we could send a man who has no previous knowledge to examine the literature of the last twenty-five centuries, his strongest impression would be that, at a certain point, a personality altogether unique in wealth and power impinged on the life of man, gradually changing the tone and stress of literature and exerting a permanent influence on it. If that man were sent through a modern art gallery, where he might see some of the great masterpieces of painting, equally he would discover that the supreme interest has gathered around this same person, who is represented in an endless number of aspects, yet is always easily recognizable. The absolute preeminence of Jesus Christ in the essential art and literature of nineteen centuries is beyond serious question. He has had no competitor. At the same time it should be remarked that the growth of Jesus' influence upon Literature and Art has not been a constant quantity. There have been periods of strange sterility in both domains during the Christian era. For one period of a thousand years, indeed, Art has practically nothing, and Literature very little that is new to tell us of the significance of Jesus.

It was not that men did not think much of Jesus that the art and literature of that period say so little that is new concerning Him. That there was no such growth in men's understanding of Him during that period as in the three previous and the six subsequent centuries, seems to be due in the main to the tendency to place the Church at the center of interest rather than Jesus. It was the

period of ecclesiasticism, of the elaboration of the Catholic idea and practice.

The story of how the Church came to be more concerned about its own place in the scheme of things than about its Lord's is a long one and can only be told very summarily here. It begins with the so-called "conversion" of Constantine early in the fourth century. At that time the Church became formally associated with the secular state; hitherto the Church had been free and independent; now it became an official corporation. And, as is the way with official corporations, it began to be more interested in its status than in its mission. Its history during the next eight or nine centuries was largely that of a struggle for supremacy with the State; and in the weapons it used, in the spirit it showed, there is little perceptible difference between it and the State. Its life became largely external; its conception of well-being was determined by the ordinary standards of the world. It became largely despiritualized and lost the open vision. And it is significant that the first conspicuous sign of a new apprehension of Jesus after this sterile period was in Dante, who was, as we shall see, also a vehement preacher of the doctrine of the separation of Church and State.

Yet during this period there were those who kept the flame of spirituality alive. The monastic movement was in its origin a protest against the spiritual bankruptcy of the official church; and in the desert, in caves of the rocks, in remote cloisters, men like Anthony, Augustine, Martin of Tours, Jerome, and Benedict of Nursa (the founder of the Benedictine Order) kept the altar-fires burning. And we may presume that there was always a succession of faithful souls, living obscure and unrecorded lives in the common ways of men, who passed on the living word in humility and sincerity from generation to generation. Professor Lindsay in his "History of the Reformation" has shown us that there was “a simple family religion in numberless German homes in the end

of the fifteenth century"; and this humble, social, religious life owed little to the prevailing ecclesiastical system. It is, indeed, in such byways of lowly piety and unpretentious saintliness that we are to seek the real channels by which the Christian life has come down the ages. In this period which we are now discussing, this living Christian hope does frequently break out through the surrounding darkness, as it did for instance in the English poet Cynewulf who sang of

who

"The great Leader, the Prince Majestic,"

""Twixt God and man placed a ghostly pledge of love." This was in 800 A. D., about the midpoint of the sterile millennium. With Dante, however, we see beginning a new age of faith and spiritual insight; and our present task will deal with some of the figures of this later period. But it may be worth while to preface our study of the prophets and poets by a brief survey of the history of the treatment of Jesus in Art.

It is a matter of common knowledge that Art sought at a very early period to represent Jesus, here by a simple symbol, there by a more deliberate attempt at portraiture. Whether these early portraits of Jesus conveyed a real likeness of Him is doubtful. Sir Wyke Bayliss says they do; Dean Farrar denies it. But it really does not matter very much. One thing, however, is significant enough, namely, that from the beginning the painter put into his picture what is virtually a confession of failure to include in the portrait all that he knew ought to be there. Was not the aureole intended to symbolize something which the painter felt to be there, but which refused to submit to pencil or pigment?

But perhaps the most significant thing of all in the story of Christian art is the complete change which came over the conception of Jesus in Art after the lapse of the

arid millennium. During that long period Art had simply reproduced the earlier tradition; but with the great awakening of modern enlightenment in the fourteenth century, there came a new race of painters, as fresh and prolific in their ideas as their immediate predecessors had been sterile and uninspired.

DAILY READINGS

Second Week, First Day

I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd layeth down his life for the sheep. He that is a hireling, and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, beholdeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth, and the wolf snatcheth them, and scattereth them: he fleeth because he is a hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd; and I know mine own, and mine own know me, even as the Father knoweth me, and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and they shall become one flock, one shepherd.-John

IO: 11-16.

Christian art made the first faltering attempts to represent Jesus that still survive, in the Catacombs, in the second and third centuries, doubtless working upon a still older tradition. He is frequently represented as "the good Shepherd”—“a beautiful, graceful figure,” as Dean Stanley has said. This fact is altogether suggestive of the freshness and bloom which the early Christians discerned in the world after the coming of Jesus. Before He came the world had grown old and gray and weary; the pallor of death was upon its face. Judaism was at its last gasp; Greek philosophy was no more than a ruin of its great past; Pan, great Pan, was sick unto death. But the coming of Jesus revitalized this old decadent world; and a new joy and light entered into it. The exuberance and spring of men newly regenerate in a world in which Hope had been raised from the dead, found