Whatever may be thought of the religious convictions of these people, that their art was profoundly influenced by them is a fact which cannot be denied: the remnant of their work which has come down to us bears ample testimony to it, from the stateliest sanctuary to the meanest wayside shrine and from the grandest municipal palace to the carved lintel of some poor workman's cot. Stories from the Old and the New Testament are sculptured on the façade of the Town Hall of Louvain, the original statues which peopled the niches of the Town Hall of Brussels were all of them the statues of saints, and on the highest pinnacle of that network of stone which forms its spire stands Saint Michael slaying the dragon, symbol of the ultimate triumph of good over ill. Nor are these things unusual, we find them over and over again throughout the Low Country. This is all the more remarkable because the art of the period was in no sense hieratic: the masons and sculptors and painters of Belgium at the time of which we are writing were ordinary working men, members of one or other of the craft guilds, and the patrons who employed them were not as a rule ecclesiastics but, for the most part, plain tradesmen; and yet their art was nothing less than the solemn profession of faith of the burghers and the craftsmen who created it--their creed made manifest in piled up brick and sculptured stone, in oak, in cedar, in iron cunningly wrought, in the saffron sheen of hammered brass, in the glister of gems, the glow of silk and in the burnished splendour of gold: a harmony magnifical of perfect forms and perfect tints in honour of Him who is above all and in all and through all--the Alpha and Omega of the universe. Herein we have the secret of their success--the faith that was in them, their vivid realisation of things unseen. This was how it was that in an age overflowing with luxury, a nation of merchants and manufacturers, who from the very nature of their pursuits must have been for the most part occupied with sordid things, were able to produce an art wholly untainted by sensualism, an art so glorious and so nearly perfect that it has hardly ever been equalled and never yet surpassed. Thus it has ever been and thus it will ever be. The average man is too commonplace and too practical to be moved by an abstract notion. It needs something which he believes to be a living reality, something which he is convinced is immeasurably above and beyond himself to enkindle in him the enthusiasm necessary to conceive and to carry out any really great idea. Art for art's sake is a formula which has sometimes hypnotised individuals of a sensitive and romantic temperament, but it has never yet converted the herd.