terrible, even for the cherubic beings to whose guardianship the human race has been assigned, will be the trumpet of the wrath of God.[134] Studying these frescoes, we cannot but reflect what nerves, what brains, what hearts encased in triple brass the men who thought and felt thus must have possessed. They make us comprehend not merely the stern and savage temper of the Middle Ages, but the intense and fiery ebullition of the Renaissance, into which, as by a sudden liberation, so much imprisoned pent-up force was driven. A different but scarcely less important phase of mediaeval thought is imaged in the frescoes of the Cappella degli Spagnuoli in S. Maria Novella.[135] Dogmatic theology is here in the ascendant. While S. Francis bequeathed a legend of singular suavity and beauty, overflowing with the milk of charity and mildness, to the Church, S. Dominic assumed the attitude of the saint militant and orthodox. Dante's words about him-- L'amoroso drudo[136] Della fede Cristiana, il santo atleta, Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nemici crudo, omit nothing that is needed to characterise the impression produced upon the Christian world by this remorseless foe of heresy, this champion of the faith who dealt in butcheries and burnings. S. Francis taught love; S. Dominic taught wrath: and both, perhaps, were needed for the safety of the mediaeval Church--the one by resuscitating the spirit of the Gospels, the other by resisting the intrusion of alien ideals ere the time for their triumph had arrived. What the painters of these frescoes undertook to delineate for the Dominicans of Florence, was the fabric of society sustained and held together by the action of inquisitors and doctors issued from their order. The Pope with his Cardinals, the Emperor with his Council, represent the two chief forces of Christendom, as conceived by the mediaeval jurists and the school of Dante. Seated on thrones, they are ready to rise in defence of Holy Church, symbolised by a picture of S. Maria del Fiore. At their feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican order--_Domini canes_, according to the monkish pun--are hunting heretical wolves. Opposite this painting is the apotheosis of S. Thomas Aquinas. Beneath the footstool of this "dumb ox of Sicily," as he was called, grovel the heresiarchs--Arius, Sabellius, Averroes. At again a lower level, as though supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged seven sacred and seven profane sciences, each with its chief representative. Thus Rhetoric and Cicero, Civil Law and Justinian, Speculative Theology and the Areopagite, Practical Theology and Peter Lombard, Geometry and Euclid, Arithmetic and Abraham, are grouped together. It will be seen that the whole learning of the Middle Age--its philosophy as well as its divinity--is here combined as in a figured abstract, for the wise to comment on and for the simple to peruse. None can avoid drawing the lesson