It was only when the clergy had been made self-conscious by the controversies which raged around the Reformation that they began in any strict and literally-minded modern sense to enforce the rule laid down at Nicæa in 787. At the Council of Trent in 1563 the great liberty of the artist within the Christian tradition came to an end: [p101] The Holy Council forbids the placing in a church of any image which calls to mind an erroneous dogma which might mislead the simple-minded. It desires that all impurity be avoided, that provocative qualities be not given to images. In order to insure respect for its decisions, the Holy Council forbids anyone to place or to have placed anywhere, and even in churches which are not open to the public, any unusual image unless the bishop has approved it. In theory this decree at Trent is not far removed from the decree at Nicæa nearly one thousand years earlier. But in fact it is a whole world removed from it. For the dogmas at Nicæa rested upon naive faith and the dogmas at Trent rested upon definition. The outcome showed the difference, for within a generation Catholic scholars made a critical survey of the lore which mediæval art had employed, and on grounds of taste, doctrine, and the like, condemned the greater part of it. After that, as M. Mâle says, there might still be artists who were Christians but there was no longer a Christian art. _(d) The Artist as Prophet_ Whether the necessity of creating his own tradition is a good or a bad thing for the artist, there can be no doubt that it is a novel thing and a burdensome one. Artists have responded to it by proclaiming one of two theories: they have said that the artist, being a genius, was a prophet; when they did not say that, they said that religion, morality, and philosophy were irrelevant, and that art should be practiced for art’s sake. Both theories are obviously attempts to find some personal substitute for those traditions upon which artists in all other ages have been dependent. [p102]