Let us imagine ourselves for a moment before the noble painting by Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. What art! What utter revelation of the power of man’s mind! But, we ask, what material did the genius of humanity choose in those days for the manifestation of its giant power? The last judgment: the Christ descending at the blare of the last trumpet, to reward the faithful and banish the sinner into everlasting pain: the Almighty, breathing His spirit into Adam, or mystically upbuilding Eve from the rib of the man. There was no “symbolic” intention in the picture; the deepest feeling of hundreds—nay, thousands—of years was embodied in it. The artist merely gave an imperishable external form to the most treasured truth of his time. Yet, slowly and gradually, what a mighty change has come about! Columbus has sailed over the blue seas, and a new side of the earth lies in the violet haze of the dawn. Copernicus sees the ball of the earth roll round the sun through space, by force of some mysterious law. Kepler dreams of the world-harmony that will replace the ever-acting Deity, and discovers at length an unsuspected regularity in the framework of the heavens. Galileo turns his new optic tube to the stars, and at once the heavens are changed, not only for the calculating, mathematical mind, but even for the eye of sense: there are jagged peaks on the moon, satellites circling about Jupiter, a wilderness of stars lying across the Milky Way, spots on the sun, rings round Saturn. Giordano Bruno shatters the ancient crystalline vault of the firmament; every “fixed star” in the Milky Way is to him a flaming sun, the pulsing heart of a whole world, in which, perchance, human hearts like ours throb and leap on a hundred planets. The red, murderous flames of hate close over Bruno, but they cannot dim the light of the new stars. It is in the eye and the brain of the new men that arise, and will nevermore fade from them. The seventeenth century, opening amid the last glare of the martyr-fires, quickens with a vague yearning and expectation. In the eighteenth century the old world breaks up. From the new stars, from the new world, new ideas come. On all sides is the crash and roar of conflict. Dread flames break out in the social, moral, and æsthetic life of men. But the century ends in the birth of a greater artist than Michael Angelo.