But inasmuch as art is preceded in Nature and the finite processes of life by a kind of antenatal history, so too there is a history that follows its culmination, which in other terms passes over and beyond its purely conceptive or plastic grasp of the Infinite. For art carries in the notion that gives it life a limit; and it is from this boundary that the human consciousness passes beyond into forms more adequate to its spiritual import. It is this inherent _shortness of the mark_ that fixes the subordinate position we are only too ready to assign to art in our daily life nowadays. For us European art is no longer the highest means in which the actuality of truth is possessed. Speaking generally, thought has long ago pronounced a verdict upon art when it defined it as the portrayal of the Divine by concepts which appeal to sense-perception. This was the judgment passed on it by the Jews and the followers of Mohammed. Nay, we find it present among the Greeks themselves, as the strong opposition of Plato and Homer and Hesiod to the popular conception of the gods proves clearly. There is a period in the education of every civilized nation, when art becomes a sign-post, as it were, to that which stands beyond her border. The evolution of Christendom is itself an illustration. The historical features of that religion, the resurrection of Christ, His life and death, have doubtless offered to the art of painting a mighty field on which to exercise its imaginative bounty; and the Church has either surrounded such art with its magnificent protection, or suffered it simply to work on unheeded. But as the love of knowledge and scientific research, and yet more the felt want of a more intimate and personal spirituality necessitated the Reformation, the religious imagination was called away from the sensuous medium which enwrapped it, and centred once for all upon the inward spirituality of emotional life and conscious thought. In this way there grew up, so to speak, that posterior twilight of Art's history I referred to, where the want has found a dwelling in man to rest satisfied alone with the pure medium of the soul as the ultimate form of truth. In the earliest beginnings of art we shall find mystery still present, a secret strain and longing which persists because Art's imaginative powers are unable to envisage to sense the complete truth of its content. When once, however, the mind of man has succeeded in endowing such content with perfect outward shape in art, it is driven inevitably away from this objective realization to its own free spiritual activity as from something repellent to it. A period such as this is our own. We may, indeed, express the hope that art will rise to yet higher grades of technical perfection; but in any case Art in its specific form has ceased to meet the highest requirements of spiritual life. We may still wonder at the unrivalled excellence of the statues of the gods of Hellas, and imagine that God the Father, Christ,