branches." It is indicative, too, of the joyous and happy character of the Christian faith.

In the next development of art we find Christ represented indirectly by pagan analogies. This was accounted for by the fact that they themselves had been pagans and were unaccustomed to any other decoration. They rejoiced to infuse these pagan figures with a new spirit. No heathen symbol better accorded with their tone of mind than that which represented the youthful Orpheus taming the wild animals with his lyre. That beautiful and attractive figure, subduing the savage passion of the animals and drawing all to listen to him, appeared to the Christians a most fit emblem of Christ as the king of love and peace, as the law of life and the harmony of the world. In times of persecution there was a distinct advantage in the use of symbols which were full of divine significance to the Christians, while they did not arouse the hatred and fury of the heathen. Thus, the stories of Cupid and Psyche were chosen as an emblem of God's love for the soul. Christian art went a step farther when it represented Christ by Old Testament figures such as that of Jonah, typifying the resurrection, and that of Daniel in the lions' den and the three children in the furnace, setting forth the same fact. This last must have been full of consolation to those who had seen their brethren wrapped in the hideous pitchy tunic and burning as living torches in the gardens of Nero. Moses striking the rock suggested Christ the fountain of living water; the sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham suggested the sacrifice of Christ.

The next advance in art represented Christ by New Testament allusions, and of these the simplest and most cherished specimens are those which represent Christ as the Good Shepherd. This touching figure seems to have inspired the simple Christian painters with delightful skill. Dean Stanley says:

It answers the question, What was the popular religion of the first Christians? It was, in one word, the religion of the Good Shepherd. The kindness, the courage, the love, the beauty, the grace of the Good Shepherd was to them, if we may so speak, Prayer Book and Articles, Creed and Canons, all in one. They looked on that figure and it conveyed to them all they wanted. As ages passed on the Good Shepherd faded from the mind of the Christian world, and other emblems of the Christian faith have taken his place. Instead of the gracious and gentle pas

tor there came the omnipotent Judge, or the crucified Sufferer, or the infant in his mother's arms, or the Master in his parting supper, or the figures of innumerable saints and angels. But the Good Shepherd represents to us the joyful, cheerful side of Christianity.

The popular conception of Christ in the early Church was of the strong and joyous youth, of eternal growth and immortal grace. So we find the Good Shepherd represented as boyish and beardless. Sometimes the Shepherd stands between a sheep and a goat, who listen to him with bowed heads. Sometimes he has his hand on his cheek, in a gesture of sorrow, as he sets forth to recover his lost and wandering sheep. But most often he is carrying the recovered sheep upon his shoulders. From the earliest days it has been noticed as an interesting circumstance that he often carries a kid on his shoulders, and not a lamb, the kid indicating the large divine compassion. This inspired what is said to be the most Christian of Matthew Arnold's poems:

"He saves the sheep, the goats he does not save."

So spake the fierce Tertullian. But she sighed,
The infant Church! Of love she felt the tide
Stream on her from her Lord's yet recent grave.

And then she smiled; and in the catacombs,
With eye suffused but heart inspired true,
On those walls subterranean, where she hid

Her head 'mid ignominy, death, and tombs,
She her Good Shepherd's hasty image drew-
And on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.

The scruple against portraying the Lord seems now to have passed away, and he is depicted as majestic, triumphant, beautiful, and youthful. During the first four hundred years there is probably no representation of Christ as bearded or as a worn and weary sufferer. But, near the close of the fourth century, the beardless face gave way to one with a beard and of an older aspect. The idea that the appearance of Jesus was plain or even repellant was one that the growing spirit of asceticism in the Church eagerly adopted. Art is history. It represents the life of the people, it mirrors the age. And, during the centuries when Christians practiced fastings and

penances, lived in monasteries, and crucified the flesh, we find them painting Christ as a suffering Saviour.

No picture of Christ which can be regarded as purely naturalistic is to be found before the Renaissance. The Church was slow to accept the views of St. John of Damascus, who argued:

Since Christ took upon him the form of a servant, and put on the fashion of a body, therefore represent him in picture. Paint his humiliation, his nativity, his baptism, his transfiguration, his agonies which ransomed us, the miracles which, though wrought by his fleshly ministry, proved his divine power and nature, his sepulture, his resurrection, his ascension, paint all these in colors, as well as in speech and in books.

Still, many of the early Christians looked with suspicion on all art, and this feeling was as strong among the learned as the poor.

It is related that in the year 326 the Empress Constantia, sister of Constantine, wrote to Eusebius of Cæsarea to ask if he would send her a likeness of Christ. The answer of the great historian was almost indignant. It was as follows:

And since you have asked about some supposed likeness or other of Christ, what and what kind of Christ is there? Do you mean the true, unchangeable likeness which bears his impress; or that which, for our sakes, he took up when he put around him the fashion and form of a slave? Such images are forbidden by the second commandment. They are not to be found in the churches, and are forbidden among Christians alone.

It is said that he entirely dissuaded the empress from desiring to possess anything of the kind. He said, "If great value is to be attached to the image of our Saviour, what better painter could we have than the Word of God himself?"

It is absolutely certain that the world and the Church have now lost forever all vestige of trustworthy traditions concerning the physiognomy of Jesus; but, if the face reflects the invisible soul, Jesus must have been the most beautiful among the sons of men. We find in neither the gospels nor the epistles one word respecting the appearance of his form or face, and yet every detail points to the certainty that there was something majestic and winning in the personal presence of Jesus. It is recorded of him, in his boyhood, that he "increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and

man; " and we reason that an ugly and marred human being could not readily have kindled that tender love and enthusiasm and confidence in young children which was so often inspired by Jesus. The early painters never forgot the true lesson which they learned from Savonarola, that "creatures are beautiful in proportion as they approximate to the beauty of their Creator, and that perfection of bodily form is relative to beauty of intellect."

The earliest pictures of Christ are youthful and beautiful; in the "Acts of the Martyrs," where visions of Christ are recorded, he is always described as young. Later we find him depicted as a full-grown man, noble and dignified. This was followed by the age which represented Jesus as aged, worn, and weary, the painter evidently having in mind the prophecy of Isaiah, "His visage was so marred, more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men," and also the words of the prophet, "He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him."

The youthful Christ is the divine Christ, "the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever;" the bearded and worn Christ is the human sufferer. As the Christian Church passed out of the darkness of the Middle Ages so its art passed out of the ascetic suffering stage into the sunlight of such immortal pictures as have been later given us by Raphael, Angelo, and Hofmann.

M.B. Myere

ART. IX.-AMERICAN PROTESTANTISM AND

PANSION.

"THE isles shall wait for his law," sang Isaiah. "America is the world's evangelist," said Senator Davis, of the Peace Commission.

When Captain Gridley of the good ship Olympia fired that first gun at Cavite, by permission and order of the great admiral on May 1, 1898, it was heard round the world and became a revelation and a prophecy. When Dewey had destroyed the Spanish fleet and cut the cable to Hong Kong, there was placed upon the shoulders of our American republic a new burden of responsibility, and there was opened up before it a wide door of opportunity to give the blessings of a modern form of government and Anglo-Saxon civilization to islands hitherto considered to be at the ends of the earth. The distant echo of Dewey's guns was a prophecy that under God, and baptized by the divine Spirit, we are equal to the responsibility of this great providential opening. Let us take counsel of our hopes rather than our fears, believing that the genius and virtue of our American Christianity are adequate to the emergency. Dr. John Henry Barrows in a personal note says: "Those who have courageous hearts and the Christian spirit of missions, and the spirit of a world-wide evangelism, see God's hand and hear God's voice in recent events."

Our subject is two fold, namely, first, the opportunity and responsibility of direct evangelism in Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines, and, second, that which is perhaps of even greater importance, the indirect influence which our American Protestant Christianity should have upon our colonial governmental policy.

Until some manifest providence shall dictate otherwise we can do no better than to stand firmly against the antiexpansion Bourbon enemies of human progress, and with President McKinley, who is the Abraham Lincoln of the new emancipation. Bear in mind that every argument which is used against expansion has been used over and over again for the past half century against foreign missions in general. In