To what degree, then, has the Pre-Raphaelite movement in English art affected, or reflected, that momentous revolution? The pictures of Rossetti, Millais, and Holman Hunt have been by turns exalted and condemned by the apologists of contending theological schools, and the painters stigmatized, now as followers of Tractarianism and instruments of Popery, now as leaders of the coarsest rationalism in sacred art, now as apostles of a sensual neo-Paganism brought over from the Renaissance, and credited to hold mystic and sceptic in equal defiance. One clerical critic, indeed, in 1857, sought in an ineffectual volume to prove the essential atheism of all Pre-Raphaelite work. His protest was but typical of that still extant species of mind to which the worship of the body implies the profanation of the soul. It remains to be decided whether such paintings touched the deepest religious principles which underlie all change of creed or ritual, and if so, in what way the art of the Pre-Raphaelites has joined or swayed the general current of humanitarian feeling which is slowly absorbing all forms of religion into a universal spirit and will. These questions bring us to the great group of pictures in which English artists for the first time have aspired to deal in all simplicity and earnestness with the bases and principles of the Christian religion. It should not be difficult to discern the dominant idea, the moral keynote, so to speak, of the highest utterances of art in an age of such religious revolution as has been suggested by the proposition of George Eliot. The philosophy of “Duty,” presented by her in its sternest aspect, but brought more into line with the common heritage of religious thought by Browning, Tennyson, F.D. Maurice, and other contemporaries of the Pre-Raphaelite band, has in fact led in art, as it has led in religion, directly, if unconsciously, to that reverent re-discovery of “God,” that transfiguration of the ideal of “Immortality,” which the revival of the spirit of romance has made possible to modern England. It has been said that “the romantic temper is the essentially Christian element in art.”[7] Let us rather say that it is the medium through which Christianity itself has been renewed and quickened into a richer and fuller life. The romantic temper, in Pre-Raphaelite art, takes hold of the eternal verities of the Christian faith, and humanizes its whole cycle of history and legend in the atmosphere of the real and present world. It ignores any sort of dividing line between sacred tragedy and the great problems of modern time. It abjures for ever the “glass-case reverence” of relic-worship, the superstition which isolates Christian history as a record of exceptional events, instead of an interpretation of universal experiences. Ruskin justly says that “imagination will find its holiest work in the lighting-up of the Gospels;” but the illumination must have a reconstructive as well as an analytic