faith--remains a miracle for those who, like our master Lionardo, love to
scrutinise the secrets of twin natures and of double graces. There are not
a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink from it as from
Hermaphroditus. These will always find something to pain them in the art
of the Renaissance.

Having co-ordinated the Christian and Pagan traditions in its work of
beauty, painting could advance no farther. The stock of its sustaining
motives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied the minds of thinking
men at this epoch was how to harmonise the two chief moments of human
culture, the classical and the ecclesiastical. Without being as conscious
of their hostility as we are, men felt that the Pagan ideal was opposed to
the Christian, and at the same time that a reconciliation had to be
effected. Each had been worked out separately; but both were needed for
the modern synthesis. All that aesthetic handling, in this region more
precocious and more immediately fruitful than pure thought, could do
towards mingling them, was done by the impartiality of the fine arts.
Painting, in the work of Raphael, accomplished a more vital harmony than
philosophy in the writings of Pico and Ficino. A new Catholicity, a
cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was manifested in his pictures.
It lay outside his power, or that of any other artist, to do more than to
extract from both revelations the elements of plastic beauty they
contained, and to show how freely he could use them for a common purpose.
Nothing but the scientific method can in the long run enable us to reach
that further point, outside both Christianity and Paganism, at which the
classical ideal of a temperate and joyous natural life shall be restored
to the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, perchance, is the
religion, still unborn or undeveloped, whereof Joachim of Flora dimly
prophesied when he said that the kingdom of the Father was past, the
kingdom of the Son was passing, and the kingdom of the Spirit was to be.