The hero is now the saint; the ideal life a life of poverty, humility, weakness, labor,--to be long-suffering, to despise and forsake the world. The present life, the heaven of Achilles, is now Hades, the forced abode of phantoms having no reality but what is given to them by religion, and the Hades of the Greek the only true and substantial world. The new church fled the light of the sun, and sought impatiently to bury itself in the tomb. The Roman catacombs were not the mere refuge of a persecuted sect,--their use as places of worship continued long after such need had ceased. But "among the graves" they found the point nearest to the happy land beyond, and the silence and the darkness made it easier to ignore for the few miserable moments that yet remained the vain tumult of the surface. In such a mood the beauty of the outward could awaken no delight, but only suspicion and aversion. Not the earth and its glories, but the fading of these before the unseen and eternal, was the only possible inspiration of Art. The extreme of this direction we see in the Iconoclasm of the eighth century, but it has never completely died out. Gibbon tells us of a Greek priest who refused to receive some pictures that Titian had painted for him, because they were too real:--"Your scandalous figures," said he, "stand quite out from the canvas; they are as bad as a group of statues." It is a tenderness towards the idea, lest it should be dishonored by actuality. Matter is gross, obscure, evil, an obstacle to spirit,--and material existence tolerable only as momentary, vanishing, and, as it were, under constant protest, and with the suspicion that the Devil has a hand in it. It belongs especially to the Oriental mind, and its logical result is the Buddhist heaven of annihilation. The defect of this view is not that it is too ideal, but that it is not ideal enough. It is an incomplete idealism that through weakness of faith does not hold fast its own point of view, and so does not dispose of matter, but leaves it outside, as negation, obstacle. The body is allowed to exist, but remains in disgrace and reduced to the barest indication. But it is honoring matter far too much to allow that it can be an obstacle. It is no obstacle, for it is _nothing_ of itself. Rightly understood, this contempt of the body is directed only against the false emphasis placed upon single aspects or manifestations. It is a feeling that the true ideal is not thus shut up in a forced exception, as if it were the subtilized product of a distillation whereby the earthly is to be purged of its dross; but that it is the all-pervading reality, which the finite can neither hinder nor help, but only obey, which death and corruption praise, which establishes itself through imperfection and transience.