In doing this I shall travel backwards, zigzag fashion, from Rome, viâ Greece to Egypt, and beginning with Christianity, I shall show how the Holy Catholic Church succeeded in establishing one of the conditions necessary to all great Art, which, as I have said, is unity and solidarity lasting over a long period of time, and forming men according to a definite and severe scheme of values. [1] Delivered at University College on Dec. 15th, 1910. 1. Rome and the Christian Ideal. The compass of these lectures does not allow me to say anything concerning the Art of Rome. There are many aspects of this Art which are both interesting and important from the historical standpoint; but, from the particular point of view which I am now representing, temporal Rome does not concern me nearly as much as sacred Rome and its provincial Government. For the first act of the Christian power was not to volatilize the stone bulwarks of the monuments of antiquity, neither was it to spiritualize the citizen of the Roman Empire; but it was to convert Rome the secular administration into Rome the Eternal City. Long before the exterior of the Græco-Roman column was divided up and sub-divided, until, despite its volume, it seemed to have no solidity whatever; and long before men's eyes and bodies were transformed from broad, spacious wells of life into narrow, tenuous cylinders of fire, a teaching was spread broadcast over the Roman Empire, the devouring power of which was astounding, and the like of whose digestion has not been paralleled in history. The Romans in their latter days had degenerated through the decline among them of that very principle which is the basis of all great art--restraint. Always utilitarians, in the end they had become materialists, and finally their will power had disintegrated. Then, suddenly--perhaps through the very fact that their will power had declined, and through a preponderance among them of a class of people who were unfit to allow themselves any material enjoyment, and who were conscious of this shortcoming--the pendulum of Life swung back with a force so great to the opposite extreme, that the Pagan world was shaken to its foundations, and in its death-agony stretched out its arms and embraced the foreign creed which said-- "Flesh is death; Spirit is life and peace. The body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. If ye live after the flesh ye shall die; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live."[2] Here was a fundamentally new valuation, a totally novel outlook upon the world of man. Some extraordinarily magnetic creator of values had spread his will over an empire, and stamped his hand upon a corner of the globe, and "the blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass,"[3] promised to be his.