Christian art began as illustration on the pages of holy books, and as illustration it expanded onto wood and canvas, bronze and marble. The peculiar grace of pictorial art crept into it incidentally, by accident of genius. That famous Giotto of the Louvre showing “Saint Francis receiving the Stigmata” is simply a direct explanation of the subject, far more beautiful in idea than in execution. There are the figures of Jesus and of Saint Francis; Christ is flying toward “the most Christ-like of men,” and gilt lines from every wound in our Savior piercing Saint Francis in the same parts of the body bind that sympathetic saint to his Redeemer, while unknown to the holy brother a halo appears back of his head. This idea of illustration made beautiful that it might be worthy of the subject which it treated, that arose in the old scriptoriums, reached its perfection on Ghiberti’s doors to the Baptistry at Florence. Michael Angelo called them the Gates of Paradise. Illuminated books of a later date display equally noble, artistic connections. I have seen little Madonnas in Books of Hours in the British Museum that seem like imperfect copies of Raphael, whereas they precede him by nearly a century. Mediæval story is full of the visits of angels to despairing illuminators and scribes who found themselves unable to execute books worthy in their material beauty to convey the word of God. Our Lady herself sometimes came down to console them. Did forecasts of the beautiful pictures yet to come sometimes appear to the humble dreamers of the cloister as they worked away on the margins of holy books? Not literally, of course, for taste was too crude to conceive of a developed art. But may not some old artist have conceived in his cell of a pictured Madonna, so beautiful that pilgrims came from afar to do her honor, so sweet that she could uplift them from sin? And perhaps the soul of that humble old scribe finds its paradise in the better part of some inscrutable genius whose Madonnas perpetually uplift the world, for the soul of a saint is active forever. [Illustration: _It is Said There is No Better Test of a Bible Student Than to Ask Him to Read the Stories which Ghiberti Tells so Distinctly on the Baptistry Doors._] But from the vantage-ground of the Old Book of Kells it is as pretty to look backward as to look forward, so sweetly does it recall a certain monastery on the Island of Iona which casts its ray in history like a good deed in a naughty world. This old book speaks eloquently of the lonely Irish cloisters where, in perhaps the darkest hour of written history, the seeds of occidental civilization were laid away until a more favorable season dawned in which to sow them broadcast.