Success is the only criterion, as in art, so in religion: the man that plucks out his eye and casts it from him, and remains the dull, greedy, distressful soul he was before, is a damned fool; but the man who does the same and becomes such that his younger friends report of him, "I never knew a sunnier nature," is an artist in life, a great artist in the sense that Christ is supposed to have been a great master; one who draws men to him, as bees are drawn to flowers. Colet drew the young Henry the Eighth as well as Erasmus. "The King said: 'Let every man choose his own doctor. Dean Colet shall be mine!'" Though no doubt charlatans have often fascinated young scholars and monarchs, yet it is peculiarly impossible to think of Colet as a charlatan. VIII Next let us take a sonnet and a sentence from Michael Angelo: Yes! hope may with my strong desire keep pace, And I be undeluded, unbetrayed; For if of our affections none finds grace In sight of heaven, then, wherefore hath God made The world which we inhabit? Better plea Love cannot have than that in loving thee Glory to that eternal peace is paid, Who such divinity to thee imparts, As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts. His hope is treacherous only whose love dies With beauty, which is varying every hour; But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower, That breathes on earth the air of paradise.[13] It is very remarkable how strongly the conviction of permanence, and the preference for the inward conception over external beauty are expressed in this fine sonnet; and also that the reason given for accepting the discipline of love is that experience shows how it "hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts." In such a love poem--the object of which might very well have been Jesus--I seem to find more of the spirit of his religion, whereby he binds his disciples to the Father that ruled within him, till they too feel the bond of parentage as deeply as himself and become sons with him of his Father;--more of that binding power of Jesus is for me expressed in this fine sonnet than in Luther's Catechism. The religion that enables a great artist to write of love in this strain, is the religion of docility, of the meek and lowly heart. For Michael Angelo was not a man by nature of a meek and lowly heart, any more than Colet was a man naturally saintly or than Luther was a man naturally refined. But because Michael Angelo thus prefers the kingdom of heaven to external beauty, one must not suppose that he, its arch high-priest, despised it. Nobody had a more profound respect for the thing of beauty, whether it was the creation of God or man. He said: "Nothing makes the soul so pure, so religious, as the endeavour to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives for perfection, strives for something that is God-like."