[2] It may fairly be questioned whether that necessary connection between art and religion, which is commonly taken for granted, does in truth exist; in other words, whether great art might not flourish without any religious content. This, however, is a speculative problem, for present and the future rather than the past. Historically, it has always been found that the arts in their origin are dependent on religion. Nor is the reason far to seek. Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of humanity only exists for simple and unsophisticated societies in the form of religion. Religion is the universal poetry which all possess; and the artist, dealing with the mythology of his national belief, feels himself in vital sympathy with the imagination of the men for whom he works. More than the painter is required for the creation of great painting, and more than the poet for the exhibition of immortal verse. Painters are but the hands, and poets but the voices, whereby peoples express their accumulated thoughts and permanent emotions. Behind them crowd the generations of the myth-makers; and around them floats the vital atmosphere of enthusiasms on which their own souls and the souls of their brethren have been nourished. [3] All Thy strength and bloom are faded: Who hath thus Thy state degraded? Death upon Thy form is written; See the wan worn limbs, the smitten Breast upon the cruel tree! Thus despised and desecrated, Thus in dying desolated, Slain for me, of sinners vilest, Loving Lord, on me Thou smilest: Shine, bright face, and strengthen me! [4] I am aware that many of my readers will demur that I am confounding Christianity with ascetic or monastic Christianity; yet I cannot read the New Testament, the _Imitatio Christi_, the _Confessions_ of S. Augustine, and the _Pilgrim's Progress_ without feeling that Christianity in its origin, and as understood by its chief champions, was and is ascetic. Of this Christianity I therefore speak, not of the philosophised Christianity, which is reasonably regarded with suspicion by the orthodox and the uncompromising. It was, moreover, with Christianity of this primitive type that the arts came first into collision. [5] Titian's "Assumption of the Virgin" at Venice, Correggio's "Coronation of the Virgin" at Parma. [6] Domenichino, Guido, Ribera, Salvator Rosa. [7] Not to quote again the _Imitatio Christi,_ it is enough to allude to S. Francis as shown in the _Fioretti_.