Before that implacable gesture which launches eternal death all the army of gigantic bodies swerves and bows, a prey to one feeling--that of fear; crushing, horrible fear relieved by no reasoning thought, a fear of blows like that of a dog under the whip. The tremendous vigour of these trembling athletes throws more harshly into relief their abject helplessness. The martyrs in order to recall to the Master their claims on His mercy exhibit servilely the instruments of their martyrdom. St. Laurence covers himself with his gridiron; St. Blaise waves his rack; St. Bartholomew holds out his bloody skin and lifts his bare knife with such ferocity that he appears rather to be the flayer than the flayed. The Virgin withdraws into the background so as not to see. Abel hides behind Adam, and one of his sisters throws herself, terrified, on Eve's knees and buries her face in the arms of her mother. The tempest howls above. The heavy flight of angels rolls through space, head over heels, bearing with an exaggerated and forced violence the column, the cross and the instruments of the Passion. Below at the right is a savage mêlée of souls and angels in a hand-to-hand struggle. At the left the bodies rise heavily from Purgatory like inflated balloons drawn up by the sun. At the bottom is the monstrous harvest of the earth giving up its dead; Hell, full of the atrocious horror of suffering and the still more atrocious joy of creating suffering. "Charon with eyes like burning coals, who smites with his oars." The maddened damned, crowded together like a herd of sheep, demons grabbing shrieking souls who hide their eyes and ears with horror, the falling of bodies which come down like masses of lead, and in the extreme right-hand corner Minos, evil and undisturbed. There is in such a work a mass of wrath, vengeance and hate which is suffocating. If it was not purified by colossal and almost elementary force it would be insupportable. [Illustration: SLAVE Figure for the tomb of Julius II (1513-1516). Louvre.] This, then, is what the Prophets and the Sibyls are looking forward to, this is what the convulsive agony of the paintings of the ceiling predicts. This implacable conclusion of human history conformed perfectly to the essence of Christian thought, but the expression of it was so audacious and so stripped of all compromise that it revolted the majority of Christians, whom Michelangelo, aristocratic in his faith as in his whole spirit, never considered at all.