consequence; must be, as the late Peter Walker Nicholson expresses it in his fine critique on Rossetti,[8] _instinctively synthetic_—which is the quality of genius: and all true art is synthetic in its essence and its end. The tendency of modern religious science to discredit the exceptional and the unique, and set the basis of morals in universal and familiar things,—in other words to deduce “God” and “Immortality” from the instinct of “Duty” and not “Duty” from the arguments for “Immortality” and “God,”—finds its correlative in the tendency of romantic art to subject the remote specialities of classicism to the test of known conditions and actual character. Therefore the four gospels, to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, do not stand alone as “religious” history, distinct from the world-wide record of human aspiration and struggle from age to age. They merely afford the supreme examples of man’s apprehension of “God, Immortality, Duty,” and of his capability of heroic labour and self-sacrifice in the pursuit of an ideal. The Pre-Raphaelites draw their first principle of religion from the beauty and glory of the natural world, and the intrinsic dignity and sacredness of human life. Their Christ is re-incarnate in the noblest manhood of all time; their Virgin Mary lives again in every pure girl that wakes to the solemn charm, the mysterious power and responsibility of womanhood. In humanity itself, with all its possibilities, in its triumphs and in its degradations, its labours and its sufferings, they re-discover “God,”—an “unknown God,” it may be; “inconceivable,” if we will; but evident in the quickened conscience of a growing world, and in the invincible instincts of human pity and love. Millais sees a young Christ in the delicate boy with the wounded hand in the dreary and comfortless carpenter’s shop. Hunt sees a crucified Christ in the tired workman, over-tasked and despairing amid the calm sunlight of eventide. Rossetti sees a risen Christ in the noble poet whose great love could conquer death and enter upon the New Life in the present hour. The true Pre-Raphaelitism does not take the halo from the head of the Christ of history; but it puts the halo on the head of every suffering child, of every faithful man and woman since the world began. It is not that the historic Christ is less divine; but that all humanity is diviner because He lived and died.