Christianity has a poetry and an art of its own; an ideal essentially different from the Greek ideal and art. Here all parallel is superficial. Polytheism is anthropomorphism. The gods of Greece are beautiful divinities under the human form. As soon as reason has comprehended God as Spirit and as Infinite Being, there appear other ideas, other sentiments, other demands, which ancient art is incapable of satisfying, to which it cannot attain, which call, consequently, for a new art, a new poetry. Thus, regrets are superfluous; comparison has no more any significance, it is only a text for declamation. What one could object to seriously in Christianity, its tendencies to mysticism, to asceticism, which, in fact, are hostile to art, are only exaggerations of its principle. But the thought which constitutes the ground of Christianity, and true Christian sentiment, far from being opposed to art, are very favorable to it. Hence springs up a new art, inferior, it is true, in certain respects, to antique art—in sculpture, for example—but which is superior in other respects, as is its idea when compared with the pagan idea. In all this, we are making but a _resumé_ of the ideas of the author. We must do him the justice to say, that wherever he speaks of Christian art, he does it worthily, and exhibits a spirit free from all sectarian prejudice. If we cast, meanwhile, a glance at the external causes which have brought about this decadence, it is easy to discover them in the situations of ancient society, which prophesy the downfall of both art and religion. We discover the vices of that social order where the state was everything, the individual nothing by himself. This is the radical vice of the Greek state. In such an identification of man and the state, the rights of the individual are ignored. The latter, then, seeks to open for himself a distinct and independent way, separates himself from the public interest, pursues his own ends, and finally labors for the ruin of the state. Hence the egoism which undermines this society little by little, and the ever-increasing excesses of demagoguism. On the other hand, there arises in the souls of the best a longing for a higher freedom in a state organized upon the basis of justice and right. In the meantime man falls back upon himself, and deserting the written law, religious and civil, takes his conscience for the rule of his acts. Socrates marks the advent of this idea. In Rome, in the last years of the republic, there appears, among energetic spirits, this antagonism and this detachment from society. Noble characters present to us the spectacle of private virtues by the side of feebleness and corruption in public morals. This protest of moral consciousness against the increasing corruption finds expression in art itself; it creates a form of poetry which corresponds to it, _satire_.