The opposition, also, which the Reformers are accused of having bent against the practice of painting has been altogether misrepresented. Not only were they not opposed to such acquirements in their proper place, but the assurance is, that they viewed such accomplishments with favor. Among the earliest Reformers, the movers of that emancipation which regenerated a portion, and made despotism more tolerable in the rest, of Europe, were to be found the most accomplished minds and the most elegant scholarship of which the age could boast. Indeed, their superior enlightenment was the human means of that liberty, in which through Christ they had become free. For such men to be the enemies of intelligence, of whatever description, if under proper guidance, and in due subserviency to higher knowledge, was to place obstacles to the spread of their own principles. Hence in Germany and in the Low Countries, the fine arts were admired and patronised by the leading Reformers. Holbein came to England most warmly recommended by Luther, who has already been named as the friend of other contemporary artists. In one respect, the Reformers certainly may be said to have been hostile to art. They proscribed the introduction of pictures into their churches. To this prohibition only, extended the penal statutes of Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth, about which so much outcry has been raised. No proscription, no interdict against religious paintings merely as such, was agitated, till the period already alluded to as the most truly disastrous to national refinement, when, in 1643, a bigoted parliament ordered, 'that all pictures which had the representation of the Saviour or the Virgin Mary in them should be burned.' The brutal fanaticism, and still more disgusting hypocrisy, of the adherents of Oliver Cromwell, have in this and in similar instances been most unjustly mixed up with the pure spirit and unsullied zeal of the genuine followers of Martin Luther. It is not intended, however, indeed it cannot be denied, that to the mere practice of painting, and to the multiplication of its labours, the exclusion of pictures from the churches is injurious. But extension is not improvement.