The result of this religious conception is to give also to art, as the principal ground of its representations, strife, conflict, sorrow and death, the profound grief which the nothingness of life, physical and moral suffering, inspire. Is not all this, in fact, an essential part of the history of the God-Man, who must be presented as a model to humanity? Is it not the means of being drawn near to God, of resembling him, and of being united to him? Man ought then to strip off his finite nature, to renounce that which is a mere nothing, and, through this negation of the real life, propose to himself the attainment of what God realized in his mortal life. The infinite sorrow of this sacrifice, this idea of suffering and of death, which were almost banished from classic art, find, for the first time, their necessary place in Christian art. Among the Greeks death has no seriousness, because man attaches no great importance to his personality and his spiritual nature. On the other hand, now that the soul has an infinite value, death becomes terrible. Terror in the presence of death and the annihilation of our being, is imprinted strongly on our souls. So also among the Greeks, especially before the time of Socrates, the idea of immortality was not profound; they scarcely conceived of life as separable from physical existence. In the Christian faith, on the contrary, death is only the resurrection of the spirit, the harmony of the soul with itself, the true life. It is only by freeing itself from the bonds of its earthly existence that it can enter upon the possession of its true nature. Such are the principal ideas which form the religious ground of romantic or Christian Art. In spite of some explanations which recall the special system of the author, one cannot deny that they are expressed with power and truthfulness. Meanwhile, beyond the religious sphere, there are developing certain interests which belong to the mundane life, and which form also the object of the representations of art; they are the passions, the collisions, the joys and the sufferings which bear a terrestrial or purely human character, but in which appear notwithstanding the very principle which distinguishes modern thought, to-wit: a more vivid, more energetic, and more profound sentiment of human _personality_, or, as the author calls it, _subjectivity_.