It is a meal of humble folk in a prison; the colours are limited to a key of sad greys and browns, excepting in the case of the man who twists his napkin, whose sleeves are thick with a vermilion like red sealing-wax, while the others might be painted with dust and pitch. These are the literal facts; but they are not the truth, for everything is transfigured. The head of Christ is luminous merely by the way He looks up; a pale radiance fills the room. This Jesus, ugly as He is, with lips like death, asserts Himself by a gesture, a look of ineffable beauty, as the murdered Son of a God! We stand dumfounded, not even trying to understand; for this work, stamped with transcendent naturalism, is beyond and apart from painting; no one can copy or reproduce it. "After Rembrandt," Durtal went on, "there is an irremediable decay of religious feeling in painting. The seventeenth century has not left a single picture in which there is a genuine stamp of manly devotion; excepting, indeed, in Spain at the time when Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross flourished there; then the mystical realism of its painters produced some fiercely fervid works;" and Durtal recalled a picture by Zurbaran he had seen and admired in the Gallery at Lyons, Saint Francis of Assisi standing upright in a habit of grey serge, the cowl over his head, his hands hidden in his sleeves. The face looked as if it had been moulded or chiselled out of cinders; the mouth was open, livid, below ecstatic eyes as white as if they had been blinded. It was a wonder how this corpse, of which nothing was left but the bones, could hold itself up; and terror came over the beholder as he thought of the excessive maceration and overwhelming penances that must have exhausted that frame and seamed that face. This painting was the evident outcome of the relentless and terrible mysticism of Saint John of the Cross, the art of the rack, the _delirium tremens_ of divine intoxication here on earth; aye, but what a passion of adoration, what a voice of love stifled by anguish found utterance in this canvas. As to the eighteenth century, it was not worth a thought; that century was the age of the belly and the bath-room; as soon as art tried to touch the Church it only made a washing-basin into a holy-water stoup. In our own time, again, there is nothing to note. Overbeck, Ingres, Flandrin--all sorry jades harnessed willy-nilly to religious tasks by commissions from the pious. In the church of Saint Sulpice Delacroix extinguishes all the feeble art that surrounds him, but his sense of Catholic art is null. In truth, faith is now dormant, and without that no mystical work is possible!