And it is remarkable that the Pre-Raphaelites find as much inspiration for the thought of victory through suffering in the incidents of Christ’s childhood as in the story of His martyrdom. Rossetti, in his early picture of “Bethlehem Gate,” in which the Holy Family are seen in flight from the massacre of the Innocents, depicts at the side of the Virgin Mother an angel bearing a palm-branch,—the symbol of deliverance and reward. Holman Hunt begins the Resurrection with “The Triumph of the Innocents,” applies, that is, the principle of Immortality to universal life; and by the ruddy, healthy faces of his angel-children watching from Heaven over the child-Christ, he insists, as Rossetti insisted in “The Blessed Damozel,” that the unknown world must be something intimately related to the one we know, and that immortal life must be something more than the continuance of spiritual being in an immaterial sphere,—must, in short, afford real and eternal activities beyond the grave. This recognition of the relation of sacrifice to victory leads the painters beyond the reconciliation of the individual man with God to the reconciliation of the social man with man. Something of this idea of “peace on earth” is suggested by Rossetti’s picture, “The Infant Christ Adored by a Shepherd and a King,” which now forms a triptych in Llandaff Cathedral,—the only picture directly from his hand which occupies a permanent position in an English church. In the left compartment is seen the young David as a shepherd before Goliath; in the right, the psalmist is depicted in old age, crowned as a king before God. In the centre, the Infant Christ appears as the mediator between the high and the lowly, the rich and the poor; the messenger of the “at-one-ment” of all ranks of men, united in a common worship of the Divine Child, and a common love of that Humanity of which He is the type. A similar interpretation of the childhood of Jesus, as typical of the growth of all humanity, may fairly be drawn from Holman Hunt’s picture of “Christ in the Temple,”—a work now thoroughly familiar to English eyes, and perhaps the most popular because the least mystical of his masterpieces. The bright, bold, ingenuous face and figure of the boy, confronting with his eager questions the venerable Rabbis of the congregation, seems instinct with the life of the present age, charged with the very essence of the spirit of inquiry—of sceptical inquiry even—before which the apologists of tradition and legalism are dumfounded, and through which, from the dogma of the old world, is wrested the faith of the new.