But here we have the breadth of minds so wide in the sweep of their intelligence, so profound in their insight, that we are almost startled with the perception that, pictured on these walls, we have indeed a true measure of the thoughts of God. Let us glance for a moment at our nineteenth century conception of education. In the first place, we divide education into religious and secular. The more devout among us insist upon religious education as well as secular. Many of us are content to do without religious education altogether, and are satisfied with what we not only _call_ secular but _make_ secular, in the sense in which we understand the word, _i.e._, entirely limited to the uses of this visible world. Many Christian people rise a little higher; they conceive that even grammar and arithmetic may in some, not very clear, way be used for God; but the Great Recognition, that God the Holy Spirit is Himself, personally, the Imparter of knowledge, the Instructor of youth, the Inspirer of genius, is a conception so far lost to us that we should think it distinctly irreverent to conceive of the divine teaching as co-operating with ours in a child’s arithmetic lesson, for example. But the Florentine mind of the Middle Ages went further than this: it believed, not only that the seven Liberal Arts were fully under the direct outpouring of the Holy Ghost, but that every fruitful idea, every original conception, whether in Euclid, or grammar, or music, was a direct inspiration from the Holy Spirit, without any thought at all as to whether the person so inspired named himself by the name of God, or recognised whence his inspiration came. All of these seven figures are those of persons whom we should roughly class as Pagans, and whom we might be lightly inclined to consider as outside the pale of the divine inspiration. It is truly difficult to grasp the amazing boldness of this scheme of the education of the world which Florence accepted in simple faith.