Gibbon, speaking of the Iconoclasts, says,--"The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last degeneracy of taste and genius." Such comparisons mistake the point. These are not parallel attempts, but opposed from the outset. The "Catholic image" was a declaration that the problem cannot be solved in that way. An early legend relates, that a painter, undertaking to copy his Christ from a statue of Jove, had his hand suddenly withered. The attempt is accused because of the pretence it makes to coordinate body and spirit, Nature and God,--as if one configuration of matter were more godlike than another. The figure of the god claims to complete what Nature has _partly_ done. But now the world is seen to be not merely the product of Mind working upon Matter, but the Creation of God out of nothing,--thus altogether His, in one part as much as in another. The only conceivable separateness, antagonism, is that of the sinful Will, setting itself up in its vanity; this it must be that arrogates to itself the ability to _represent_ its Creator. The Christian image is without form or comeliness,--rejects all outward graces, seemingly glories in abasement and deformity, fearing only to attribute to Matter some value of its own. Henceforth the connection is no longer at arm's-length, as of the workman and the material. Resistance to limitation is changed into joyful acceptance; for it is not in the limitation, but in the resistance, that the misery of earth consists. The quarrel with imperfection is over. The finite shall neither fortify itself in its finiteness, nor seek to abolish it, but only make it the willing instrument of universal ends. Thus the true self first exists, and no longer needs to be extenuated or apologised for. The key-note of all this is contained in those verses of the "Dies Irae,"-- "Quaerens _me_ sedisti lassus, Redemisti crucem passus; Tantus labor non sit cassus." Here we have in its compactest expression the difference between this age and the classic: that I, the vilest of sinners, am the object of God's highest care,--not the failure and mistake I seem, not the slag and refuse of Nature's working, but the object of this most stupendous mystery of the Divine economy. It is no purification or idealizing that is needed,--any such attempt must be abomination,--but a new birth of the self, by devotion of it to the purpose for which it was made.