Christian art preserved its primitive significance for more than half a
millennium. Therein I see no marvel. Even ideas and emotions travelled
slowly in those days. In one respect, at any rate, trains and
steam-boats have fulfilled the predictions of their exploiters--they
have made everything move faster: the mistake lies in being quite so
positive that this is a blessing. In those dark ages things moved
slowly; that is one reason why the new force had not spent itself in six
hundred years. Another is that the revelation came to an age that was
constantly breaking fresh ground. Always there was a virgin tract at
hand to take the seed and raise a lusty crop. Between 500 and 1000
A.D. the population of Europe was fluid. Some new race was
always catching the inspiration and feeling and expressing it with
primitive sensibility and passion. The last to be infected was one of
the finest; and in the eleventh century Norman power and French
intelligence produced in the west of Europe a manifestation of the
Christian ferment only a little inferior to that which five hundred
years earlier had made glorious the East.

Let me insist once again that, when I speak of the Christian ferment or
the Christian slope, I am not thinking of dogmatic religion. I am
thinking of that religious spirit of which Christianity, with its dogmas
and rituals, is one manifestation, Buddhism another. And when I speak of
art as a manifestation of the religious spirit I do not mean that art
expresses particular religious emotions, much less that it expresses
anything theological. I have said that if art expresses anything, it
expresses an emotion felt for pure form and that which gives pure form
its extraordinary significance. So, when I speak of Christian art, I
mean that this art was one product of that state of enthusiasm of which
the Christian Church is another. So far was the new spirit from being a