Here is a reproduction of the childhood of the Saviour in the terms of a homely Netherland family life, the naturalistic treatment diversified by the use of angelic machinery. The prints were a part of the apparatus used by the priests in educating the people. However such instruction may have fallen short of the highest truths of Christianity, its recognition of the simple duties of life and its enforcement of these by the example of the Son of Man make us slow to regard such interposition of the church as remote from the spirit of Christ. If, as is quite possible, these prints were employed by the Jesuits, then their significance becomes doubly noticeable. In that vigorous attempt by Loyola and his order to maintain an organic Christian unity against the apparent disruption of Christianity, such a mode as this would find a place as serving to emphasize that connection between the church and the family which the Jesuits instinctively felt to be essential to the supremacy of the former. III Whatever light the treatment of the Madonna subject may throw upon the ages in which it is uppermost in men’s thoughts, the common judgment is sound which looks for the most significance in the works of Raphael. Even those who turn severely away from him, and seek for purer art in his predecessors, must needs use his name as one of epochal consequence. So many forces of the age meet in Raphael, who was peculiarly open to influences, that no other painter can so well be chosen as an exponent of the idea of the time; and as one passes in review the successive Madonnas, one may not only detect the influence of Perugino, of Leonardo, of Michelangelo, and other masters, but may see the ripening of a mind, upon which fell the spirit of the age, busy with other things than painting.