The affinity between Zoroastrianism and art is easily explained when we consider that in one respect it has a manifest advantage over most Christian forms of religion. Christianity in its early origins received a taint of Oriental asceticism which it never shook off, and which in the declining centuries of the Roman empire, and in the barbarism and superstition of the Middle Ages, developed into what may be almost called a devil-worship of the ugly and repulsive. The antithesis between the flesh and the spirit was carried to such an extreme and false extent, that everything that was pleasant and beautiful came to be regarded as sinful, and the odour of sanctity was an odour which the passer-by would do well to keep on the windward side of. This leaven of asceticism is the rock upon which Puritanism, monasticism, and many of the highest forms of Christian life have invariably split. It is contrary to human nature, and directly opposed to the spirit of the life and doctrines of the Founder of the religion. Jesus, who was ‘a Jew living among Jews and speaking to Jews,’ adopted the true Jewish point of view of making religion amiable and attractive, and denouncing, as all the best Jewish doctors of the Talmud did, the pharisaical strictness which insisted on ritualistic observances and arbitrary restrictions. In no passages of his life does the ‘sweet reasonableness’ of his character appear more conspicuous than where we find him strolling through the fields with his disciples and plucking ears of corn on the Sabbath, and replying to the formalists who were scandalised, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.’ The ascetic bias subsequently introduced may have been a necessary element in counteracting the corruption of Rome; but the pendulum in its reaction swung much too far, and when organised in the celibacy of the clergy and monastic institutions asceticism became the source of great evils. Even at a late period we can see in the reaction of the reign of Charles II. how antagonistic the puritanical creed, even of men like Cromwell and Milton, proved to the healthy natural instinct of the great mass of the English nation. And at the present day it remains one of the main causes of the indifference or hostility to religion which is so widely spreading among the mass of the population. Children are brought up to consider Sunday as a day of penance, and church-going as a disagreeable necessity; while grown-up men, especially those of the working classes, resent being told that a walk in the country, a cricket-match, or a visit to a library or museum on their only holiday, is sinful.