"We do not find the smallest tendency to represent God the Father. [Footnote 19] Scenes, indeed, in which he acted were frequently depicted, but the First Person of the Trinity was invariably superseded by the Second. Christ, in the dress and with the features appropriated to him in the representations of scenes from the New Testament, and often with the monogram underneath his figure, is represented creating man, condemning Adam and Eve to labor, ... or giving the law to Moses. With the exception of a hand sometimes extended from the cloud, and occasionally encircled with a nimbus, we find in this period no traces in art of the Creator. {86} At first we can easily imagine that a purely spiritual conception of the Deity, and also the hatred that was inspired by the type of Jupiter, would have discouraged artists from attempting such a subject, and Gnosticism, which exercised a very great influence over Christian art, and which emphatically denied the divinity of the God of the Old Testament, tended in the same direction; but it is very unlikely that these reasons can have had any weight between the sixth and the twelfth centuries. For the more those centuries are studied, the more evident it becomes that the universal and irresistible tendency was then to materialize every spiritual conception, to form a palpable image of everything that was reverenced, to reduce all subjects within the domain of the senses."--(Vol. i. pp. 224-5.) [Footnote 19: We cannot ourselves, as Catholics, admit that there is necessarily the smallest impropriety or inexpediency in picture or sculptured representations of God the Father (See Denzinger, n. 1182 and 1482); yet we may fairly argue that the absence of such, at the period in question, disproves Mr. Lecky's assertion that the dominant tendency of that period was anthropomorphous.] The most celebrated of the theologians of the middle ages is undoubtedly St. Thomas Aquinas. St. Thomas, however, comes in for an extra share of misrepresentation. At p. 72, vol. ii., we read of him, that he was one of the ablest writers of the fourteenth century--he died in the thirteenth-- and that "he assures us that diseases and tempests are the direct acts of the devil, that he can transport men at his pleasure through the air," and that "omnes angeli, boni, et mali, ex naturali virtute habent potestatem transmutandi corpora nostra." Now all this is precisely what St. Thomas denies. In the first place, anyone would imagine from the manner in which our author writes, that the great mediaeval theologian imagined that, in the ordinary course of things, diseases and tempests are produced by Satanic agency. St. Thomas never taught any such thing, but over and over again refers both the one and the other to natural causes. [Footnote 20] [Footnote 20: V.g., Comm. in Ps. xvii., and in Arist. Meteor. i. 2, lect xvi.; cf. Summa, i. 2, q. 50, a. 2.]