"The unfathomable mystery remains what it has always been and what it is, unfathomable. God does not belong to the scholar, the logician. He belongs to the poets, to their dreams. He is the symbol of Beauty, Beauty itself." From these and other jottings we can understand what was passing in Gauguin's mind when he painted the pictures: _Le Christ Jaune_ and _Le Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers_; when he carved the contrasted bas-reliefs: _Soyez Amoureuses and Soyez Mystérieuses_; when he drew the lithographs: _La Cigale et les Fourmis_, and _Léda_ which bears the defiant inscription "Honi soit qui mal y pense." Gauguin was a mystic who sought instinctively for religious illumination, not in the systems of philosophers and theologians, but in nature and in man. Among the higher types of civilized man he saw only a false system of morality, politics and religion, which elevated the wealthy above the level of the rest of humanity and forbade to the thinker, the artist, the independent workman, the very right to live. Against the organized materialism of the nineteenth century, he recognized in Jesus Christ a revolt and a protest; but a revolt and a protest that had failed. Humanity had not yet produced, save by exception, the higher type of man, the man capable of "selling all and giving to the poor," the man chosen "to enter the Kingdom of Heaven." A terrible epoch, he foresaw, was coming in Europe for the next generation: an epoch where the tyranny of money would destroy mankind. Therefore, in contemplating Christ, he was moved by a sense of despair, of the futility of this sacrifice. His attitude to Christianity became purely Protestant. Across his pictures there moves no gracious shadow of the beneficent Virgin, sharing with humanity the joys and sorrows of maternity. In _Le Christ Jaune_ he gives us the symbol of a faith which has proved impotent to elevate mankind to its level. _Le Christ au Jardin d'Oliviers_ echoes the awful cry, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The terrible little picture, _Les Misères Humaines_ sums up in its two figures the despair and hypocrisy of our vaunted civilization. Even the later Tahitian _Birth of Christ_ renders nothing but the physical anguish and exhaustion of maternity. In the _Ia Orana Maria_, or the Salutation to Mary, the Virgin is represented merely as a happy human mother.