The Re-birth of Religious Art—“God, Immortality, Duty”—The Pre- Raphaelites and the Reconstruction of Christianity—The Halo in Painting—The Responsibility of Womanhood—The “Girlhood of Mary Virgin” and “Ecce Ancilla Domini”—The Problem of Suffering—“Christ in the House of His Parents,” “The Passover in the Holy Family,” “The Shadow of Death,” “The Scapegoat”—Hunt’s Symbolism—“The Light of the World”—Rossetti’s Symbolism—“Mary Magdalene at the Door,” and “Mary in the House of John”—The Idea of Victory Through Suffering— “Bethlehem Gate”—“The Triumph of the Innocents”—The Spirit of Inquiry—“Christ in the Temple”—The Atonement—“The Infant Christ Adored”—Comparison with Madox Brown and Burne-Jones—“The Entombment”—“The Tree of Life.” “God—Immortality—Duty;” such were the weighty words chosen by one of the greatest women of our century as the text of a now historic conversation in the shadow of St. John’s College, Cambridge. The student to whom she spoke has told us with what a tender solemnity she approached the great postulations which those words conveyed, and challenged them in her inflexible judgment one by one;—to her, how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, but yet how imperative and irresistible the third. The attitude of George Eliot, even in the phase of intellectual scepticism from which she then spoke, was deeply significant of that fundamental change in the constitution of religion, that entire transference of Christian or non-Christian “evidences,” from the intellectual to the moral sphere, from the argument to the instinct, which is now largely accepted as the supreme result of modern thought in Europe. For the repudiation of prior conceptions of “God” and “Immortality,” so far from precluding a reconstructive faith, rather prepared the way for it; making the belief in unseen goodness a deduction from instead of a premise to the recognition of visible goodness in the present world, and leaving the more scope for that growing reverence for the physical nature of man which,—having its origins in Paganism and its highest sanction in the Gospel of Galilee, and revealing itself in a passionate exaltation of bodily beauty as a symbol of the divine, a resolute acceptance of the laws of nature and destiny, and a strenuous blending of resignation to those laws with conquest of them by spiritual powers,—has inspired the great humanitarian movement of to-day, wherein the faith of the future finds the witness and the justification of its ideal.