artistic ideal. He felt there, felt amid the stirring of some
wonderful new hope within himself, the genius, the unique power of
Christianity; in exercise then, as it has been exercised ever since,
in spite of many hindrances, and under the most inopportune
circumstances. Chastity,--as he seemed to understand--the chastity
of men and women, amid all the conditions, and with the results,
proper to such chastity, is the most beautiful thing in the world and
the truest conservation of that creative energy by which men and
women were first brought into it. The nature of the family, for
which the better genius of old Rome itself had sincerely cared, of
the family and its appropriate affections--all that love of one's
kindred by which obviously one does triumph in some degree over
death--had never been so felt before. Here, surely! in its genial
warmth, its jealous exclusion of all that was opposed to it, to its
own immaculate naturalness, in the hedge set around the sacred thing
on every side, this development of the family did but carry forward,
and give effect to, the purposes, the kindness, of nature itself,
friendly to man. As if by way of a due recognition of some
immeasurable divine condescension manifest in a [111] certain
historic fact, its influence was felt more especially at those points
which demanded some sacrifice of one's self, for the weak, for the
aged, for little children, and even for the dead. And then, for its
constant outward token, its significant manner or index, it issued in
a certain debonair grace, and a certain mystic attractiveness, a
courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that famed Greek
"blitheness," or gaiety, or grace, in the handling of life, had been,
after all, an unrivalled success. Contrasting with the incurable
insipidity even of what was most exquisite in the higher Roman life,
of what was still truest to the primitive soul of goodness amid its
evil, the new creation he now looked on--as it were a picture beyond