But the finite thus isolated is not honored, but degraded. This stagnant perfection is atrophy,--as some poisons are said to kill by arresting the transformation of the tissues, and so to preserve them at the expense of their life. The new era is marked by the perception that these shortcomings are not accidental, but inherent and intended. The chasm is not to be bridged or avoided,--or, as Plato says, the human to become godlike by taking away here and adding there,--but remains a radical incongruity of Nature, never to be escaped from. It brings death and dissolution to the fair shapes of the earlier world,--for the worship of form is justified only so long as the mind thinks forms and not ideas. The statue may embody an infinite meaning, but to the artist form and meaning are one. It is not a sentiment that he puts into this shape, but it is the shape itself that inspires him. The symbolism of Greek Art was the discovery of a later age. We know what is meant by Circe and Athene, but Homer did not. It was thus only that the Greek mind could grasp ideas,--this is the thoroughly _artistic_ character of that people. Their philosophers were always outlaws. What excited the rage of the Athenians against Socrates was his endeavor to detach religion from the images of the gods. When it comes to comparisons between meaning and expression, as adequate or inadequate, it is evident their unity is gone;--the meaning is first, and the expression only adjunct or illustration. It did not impair the sacredness of the Greek deities that they were the work of the poets and sculptors. But the second Nicene Council forbade as impious any images of Christ as God, and allowed only his human nature to be represented,--a strange decree, if the Church had realized its own doctrine, that the humanity of Christ is as real as his divinity. But the meaning is, that the finite is not there to stand for the infinite, but only to indicate it negatively and indirectly,--that its glory is not to persist in its finiteness, not to hold on to its form, but to be transformed. The figure of Thersites would be very unsuitable for Achilles, but is suitable enough for a saint; it was a pardonable exaggeration to make it even more suitable.