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these seven hundred years does the oracle of Micah, the seer, seem on the point of dissolving into space. Feebly

God whom the fingers of our soul have fashioned. The "attributes of God"-what are they but the qualities which we attribute to him. What is our conception of God, practi- | flickering and glimmering in the dreary night, creeping cally speaking, but an ideal man infinitely multiplied? Accordingly, even Scripture itself is anthropomorphic, representing Deity under human limitations and figures, speaking of God's eye, ear, hand, voice, heart; picturing him as grieved, repenting, and the like. Not that these are literally facts; they are but ladders by which the soul climbs up to her eternal habitation. Meanwhile, God himself is infinite, and therefore theoretically inconceivable.

But do not misunderstand me. Because I assert that God is inconceivable, it does not follow that I mean to assert that there is no God. What though we admit with Sir William Hamilton and Dean Mansel, that the unconditional is incognizable and inconceivable?

In spite of this agnosticism, cling steadfastly to the divine personality. Experiment-that is to say experience, Francis Bacon tells us, is the ground text in physics. Is experience any less the text in religion? What though I can not cognize or conceive the unconditioned and infinite? Have I no superior, subtle sense within, by which I, finite though I am, can yet in very truth apprehend the Infinite One? Have I not the capacity by which I can experience the Divine? Happy you and I if we can carry the Baconian text of experiment into our daily spiritual life, confidently exclaiming with the greatest of the apostles: "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day." Did the Bible contain no difficulties, this very absence would raise a presumption against its divine origin. It is not reasonable to claim a supernatural authorship for the Bible while its human authorship is possible. "A religion without mystery," says Robert Hall, "is a temple without a God." Yes; I glory in the difficulties of Scripture. O, the depth of riches, and wisdom, and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? Or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For from him, and through him, and to him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.

But, although some of the difficulties of Scripture are forever insoluble, others of them are soluble at least in large part. To some of these latter difficulties let us now attend. Let us take our first instance from the list of metaphysical difficulties: e. g., The problem of God's sovereignty and man's freedom. Let me illustrate by a historical instance. More than seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus Christ, the prophet Micah gave utterance to the following remarkable prophecy: "Thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be small among the thousands of Judah, out of thee shall go forth for me he that is to be ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from the days of eternity." Without stopping to comment on the details of this prediction, I merely ask you to note in this connection how particularly the prophet designates the birthplace of the promised Messiah. Gazing down from the mount of prophecy, casting his piercing glance over all the world, his prophetic eye at last rests on a little hamlet six miles south of Jerusalem, and he announces, with the confidence of one who had been an eye witness of the scene, and was describing it historically, that in Bethlehem of Judea shall be born one who shall reign, the Universal, Everlasting King. And, committing his oracle to the keeping of the God of Abraham and of David, Micah lies down to sleep in the sepulcher of his fathers. And now, century after century creeps on, plunging into the abyss of eternity, as it takes its awful plunge, carries down with it the ruin of many a scheme, and the downfall of many a kingdom. Untold times during

over the land of promise, ever and anon it seems as though it must go out forever, as some fresh tempest of foreign fury sweeps over and desolates the Holy Land. Invader after invader marches through the country. Uncircumcised heathen sit on the throne of David. The idols of Nebuchadnezzar are enshrined in the holy places. Jerusalem yields the key of her fortress to Alexander. The Egyptian Ptolemies renew the yoke imposed by the ancient Pharaohs. The bugles of Antiochus the Great resound from Lebanon to the Sea of the Dead. At length Judea shakes beneath the heavy tramp of the legions of Pompey, and she lies smitten, spoiled, scattered. The sceptre has departed from Judah, and the ruler's staff from between his feet. The throne of David, once so august, has crumbled into ruin. Flocks of sheep still graze on the hillsides of Bethlehem, but no scion of the royal house is there to tend them, or to echo the pastoral song of the monarch minstrel: "The Lord is my Shepherd-I shall not want."

Nevertheless the oracle hath gone forth that out of Bethlehem Ephratah shall one go forth who will shepherd Israel. But how can the oracle be fulfilled? Behold, then, a wonderful movement of that almighty finger, at whose touch creation sways. Far off across the Mediterranean, on another continent, revels in imperial splendor Cæsar Augustus. Little does this monarch, on whose brow glitters the crown of an almost universal empire, dream that, while the world is bending the knee. before him, he himself is an appointed instrument for the execution of a purpose conceived from the foundation of the world. That same Almighty God, who, through the restlessness of a Persian monarch, had rescued from annihilation the stock from which his Anointed was to spring, now prepared a birthplace for his Anointed through the edict of a Roman emperor. For when the fullness of the time had come, and the Christ was to be born, Cæsar Augustus issued a decree that all the world should be enrolled, and, since it was the Jewish custom that each Israelite should be registered in the birthplace of his chief ancestor, Joseph and Mary went from Nazareth, in Galilee, where they were living, to Bethlehem, in Judea, where their ancestor, David, had been born, to be enrolled. And it came to pass, while they were there, that the days for her delivery were completed, and she brought forth her first-born son, even Immanuel, and thus a minute prophecy, a thousand times imperiled in the course of seven centuries, was at last minutely accomplished. Oh! who does not feel that a God is here? Who can resist the conviction that he has had from the beginning his purposes, and actually controls every movement of every human will? Yet there is no reason for supposing that Augustus Cæsar, in issuing his decree of universal census, was conscious that in so doing he was preparing the way for the accomplishment of an ancient prediction. A Roman, he cared nothing for the Hebrews; a pagan, he knew nothing of Messianic prophecies. His issuing a decree of enrollment was nothing unnatural or extraordinary; it was one of the commonest acts of a political ruler; and he himself was one of the most methodical of men. Yet, who can doubt that Cæsar Augustus, in issuing this decree, was accomplishing a predetermined purpose of the Ancient of Days? Nevertheless, nothing is clearer than that Cæsar Augustus in publishing this edict, and Joseph and Mary in visiting Bethlehem in accordance with its requirements, acted as perfectly free voluntary beings. They governed themselves according to circumstances perfectly natural in themselves. Augustus ordered the registration because he was a man of method, and wanted statistics. Joseph and Mary visited Bethlehem in order to obey the mandate, and yet in do

ing so were they not fulfilling-it matters not how unconsciously to themselves-a certain prediction? Were they not instruments of a certain purpose? Was it not divinely foreseen, and divinely foreseen because divinely foreordained, that Cæsar Augustus should issue this decree, and that Joseph and Mary should visit Bethlehem?

Now, I have alluded to this matter simply for the purpose of showing that when we look at this frequently propounded problem of the reconciliation of divine sovereignty and human freedom in its historic, practical matter-of-fact aspect, the difficulties vanish.

When God, through his prophet, Micah, foretold that his Messiah should be born at Bethlehem, he intended that the virgin mother of the Messiah should be brought to her ancestral city by a decree of a Roman emperor. But this Roman emperor issued this decree not because he was aware of this prophecy and wished to fulfill it, but because he desired a census. He simply did as he chose. Just here I leave the point. Considered practically in its matter-offact aspect, this difficulty of Scripture is really no difficulty. It is only when we pry into that domain of infinite problem, which God has not opened to us, that we become bewildered and lost. Let us be content with reverentially believing what God has revealed to us; that will be quite enough for the blissful contemplations of an eternity.

Let us now glance at another class of Scriptural difficulties-the ethical, e. g., the command to offer up Isaac, the imprecatory psalms, the permission of retaliation and slavery and polygamy, the character of such men as Noah, and Lot, and Jacob, and Samson, and David, and similar ethical difficulties.

How reconcile these divine commands with a just and merciful God? How reconcile these unworthy characters with the Scriptural designation of these as holy men, walking before God, with a perfect heart? The difficulty is really formidable, and deserves candid recognition and treatment, not that I expect to solve everything. "To become wise as God," you remember, was a satanic suggestion. But there are certain general principles which, I trust, will shed light on the problem before us, and, first, distinguish between Scriptural silence and Scriptural approval. In reading the Bible, nothing impresses me more than the fearless candor with which it tells the story of its heroes, never concealing defects nor palliating crimes. Not so are human biographies written. In fact, it is this very truthfulness, or fearlessness, of candor, which constitutes one of the chief difficulties of Scripture. But, observe, Scriptural silence is not necessarily Scriptural approval. Again, as a matter-of-fact, the sins of the Biblical worthies were punished. Take the case of Jacob. How startlingly his career illustrates the law of the moral harvest: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." Jacob sowed deceit, and he reaped deceit; so that his gray hairs went down with sorrow to the grave. Or take the case of Moses; although he seems to have approached as near perfection as mortal man ever did, yet, because on one occasion he indulged in a burst of temper and spoke unadvisedly with his lips, he was denied the privilege of setting his foot in the promised land. Or take the case of David in the matter of Uriah and Bathsheba; how quickly he was bereft of the son of his guilty love; from that day the sword never departed from his house; his old age was sorrowful and wretched in the extreme. As we recall these instances of sin and punishment on the part of God's ancient servants, we are forced to declare with Victor Hugo: "Justice is a theorem, punishment is exact as Euclid, crime has its angles of incidence and its angles of reflection, and we men tremble when we perceive in the obscurity of human destiny the lines and figures of that enormous geometry which the world calls chance, and the thinking man calls Provi

dence." Again, take note that the revelation of divine truth was a process slowly unfolding. "God having at sundry times and in divers manners spoken in time past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath at the end of these days spoken unto us by his Son." What Bacon has said of Nature, we may say of Scripture, it does nothing by leaps. Recall the low, infantile state of the ancient cultus, or morality. It is almost impossible for us to bedwarf ourselves far enough into the hoary past to conceive the pigmy dimensions of the patriarchal ethics. Remember that Jesus Christ had not then taught the divine ethics by his life, much less by his death. Were it possible to take from human memory every vestige of Christ's character and teachings and work, what think you would be the morals of Christendom to-day? The Christian Church, at least in this matter of illumination, is in an incomparably more favorable condition than was the Jewish. What though John the Baptist was the greatest that had been born of women? The least in the kingdom of heaven, or the Messianic dispensation, is greater than John the Baptist. The least Christian is, in point of privilege, greater than the greatest Jew. Even we, although living in the blaze of the nineteenth century, fall far below Christ's standard of the beatitudes. It is not yet a score of years since African slavery was abolished in Christian America. To this day Christian nations appeal to the arbitration of the sword. Let us not, then, judge too severely the moralities of the Hebrew patriarchs. Character is as a matter of fact, largely a question of light.

Remember the words of the Lord Jesus concerning the Pharisees: "If I had not come and spoken unto them, they would not have sinned; but now they have no excuse for their sin." Remember that Abraham was the son of an idolater; that the Hebrews were enslaved four hundred years in Egypt; that David lived a thousand years before Christ. I mention these things, not for the purpose of palliating the immoralities of the ancients, but simply for the purpose of representing their case fairly. They lived in the dim dawn of humanity. A twilight age yields a twilight religion. Once more: distinguish between absolute truth and relative truth. In other words, notice how God, in his treatment of his ancient people, observed the law of adaptation or relativity, the principle of economy or parsimony of action. It was a splendid instance of "Divine accommodation," adjusting his revelation to the capacities as well as to the needs of his people. It was on this principle of economy of action or law of relativity that the Heavenly Teacher ever proceeded. Compare his mountain-instruction, given in the early part of his ministry, and his farewell discourse on the night of the betrayal. And even on this very night he said to his disciples: "I have still many things to say unto you, but ye can not bear them now." Thus he practiced his own precept of the mountain: "Give not that which is holy unto the dogs; neither cast ye your pearls before the swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and rend you." Even so did God treat the people of the patriarchal period.' To have offered them the lofty instructions of the mountain sermon or the profound doctrine of St. Paul, would have been like placing the calculus in the hands of a savage, or a spectroscope in the hands of a child. And now let us glance at the bearing of these general principles on the problem of the ethics or morality of the Old Testament. Take, e. g., God's command to offer up Isaac. Recall the dense darkness of Abraham's era; his own idolatrous ancestry; the universal prevalence of human sacrifice. Moreover, survey the scene on Moriah as a whole, the issue as well as the beginning, the ram in the thicket as well as the son on the altar. Thus, the whole scene was meant to be educational, instructing the Chaldean emigrant in the great doctrine

of vicarious sacrifice by means of a transitional liturgy. Or take the character of Jacob. Remember that he lived nearly two thousand years before Christ taught in his mountaininstruction the philosophy and art of holy living. Yet Jacob felt the inspiration of an exalted ideal, and he felt it so powerfully that it shaped his whole life, enabling him to subordinate the present to the future. The very greatness of his ideal tempted him to use wrong means. Instead of patiently trusting God's own time and way of executing his promise, he undertook to hasten that execution by his own strategy. Do we never undertake to do the same? Or take the case of David, "the man after God's own heart," and at the same time an assassin and an adulterer. Nevertheless, he was true of heart, and so the general trend of his character was heavenward. What though David fell so profoundly? Listen to the words of that stern critic and fierce censor, Thomas Carlyle. I quote from his "Heroes and Hero Worship:" "On the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real center of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there the man according to God's own heart? David, the Hebrew king, had fallen into sins enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins, and thereupon unbelievers sneer and ask: Is this your man according to God's own heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but a shallow one. What are faults, what are the outward details of a life, if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, the often-baffled, never-ended struggle of it, be forgotten? It is not a man that walketh to direct his steps. Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin; that is death; the heart so conscious is diverted from sincerity, humility, and, in fact, is dead; it is pure as dead, dry sand is pure. David's life and history, as written for us in those psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblems ever given of a man. Moral progress and warfare here below, all earnest souls will ever discern in the faithful struggle of an earnest, human soul toward what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore buffeted, down as into entire wreck, yet a struggle never ended; ever with tears, repentance, true, unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature! Is not a man's walking in truth always that: a succession of falls? Man can do no other. In this wild element of a life, he has to struggle onward; now fallen, deep-abused, and ever with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again, still onward. That his struggle be a faithful, unconquerable one, that is the question of questions. We will put up with many sad details, if the soul of it were true." Summing up what I have to say touching this problem of the Old Testament morality, let me express the conclusion in the saying of Paul to the men of Athens: "The times of this ignorance God winked at-overlooked; but now he commandeth all men everywhere to repent." Openly let not this man of Nineveh rise up in the judgment to condemn us! There is another class of difficulties to which I must for a moment allude. It is what I have called circumstantial difficulties, such as discrepancies as to persons, places, times, numbers, and the like. Many of these so-called discrepancies vanish when subjected to a searching criticism, especially in light of the unquestioned fact that different narrators, in surveying the same transactions from different points of view, and each having his own special purpose in hand, will of course vary in the accounts. In fact, the very diversity of Scriptural narratives is a sign of their truthfulness; forgers would have taken pains to seem consistent. The discrepancy, therefore, instead of being a sign of mendacity, is a sign of veracity. Nor should I omit

to mention, for it is a striking fact, that whatever the difficulties of Scripture may be, not one of them is the kind which affects our personal salvation. Whatever truths of Scripture are "saving," lie entirely on the surface;

"Which he may read that binds the sheaf,

Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roaring round the coral reef."

And now let me say a few words touching the purpose of the difficulties of Scripture. First, they instigate to study. Even the Bible of nature has its difficulties. Nor let me remark in passing, does any one object to it on that account. It is the very difficulties of nature which have excited philosophical curiosity, and so led the way to the grandest scientific achievements. It is pre-eminently true of the difficulties of Scripture. They are the great quickeners of human thinking, a very gymnasium for the development of mental as well as moral muscle. Again; the difficulties of Scripture tend to foster the spirit of humanity. They teach the teachable. Greatness and meekness go hand in hand. It is the sciolist who knows every thing. It is the sage-the sage in truth as well as in name-who confesses with Sir Isaac Newton by the seashore that he knows scarcely anything. "The highest reach of human science," says Sir William Hamilton, "is the scientific recognition of human ignorance." Yes, I glory in my finiteness; for this is the real occasion of the difficulties of Scripture. This it is which will make the heavenly society eternally a church of the disciples. Once more: the difficulties of Scripture furnish a test of character. Let me be frank with you. In what spirit are you wont to meet these difficulties. In a captious spirit, seeking to multiply them; or in an humble spirit, seeking to reconcile them? It is quite possible that these very difficulties may be morally fatal. Recall that saying of Peter with which I began this lecture; "in which epistles are some things hard to be understood which the ignorant and unstable wrest, as they also do the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction." Verily, the sword of the spirit, even the word of God, is a two-edged sword; it may be used suicidally as well as controversially, and so it comes to pass that this child is set for the falling as well as the rising of many in Israel. While to some he is a corner-stone-sure, elect, preciousto others he is a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. God forbid that in the case of any one of us, our very familiarity with Scripture should be the occasion of moral suicide! And now, let me in conclusion recall to your memory the vision of Sinai's cleft. Moses said unto the Lord: "I beseech thee, show me thy glory." And the Lord said unto Moses: "I will all my goodness pass before thee, I will proclaim of the Lord before thee, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, I will show mercy to whom I will show mercy; thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me, and thou shalt stand upon a rock, and it shall come to pass, while my glory passeth by, that I will put thee in a cleft of the rock, and will cover thee with my hand while I pass by; and I will take away my hand and thou shalt see my back parts; but my face shall not be seen." Profoundly significant is this vision of the cleft. Let me direct your attention to two points. First, God's face can not be seen. He dwelleth in light which no man can approach unto, whom no man hath seen or can see, to whom be honor and power everlasting. Amen. "You teach," said the Roman emperor, Trajan, to the Hebrew rabbi, Joshua, "that your God is everywhere, and boast that he especially resides among his people. I should like to see him." "Sire," said the rabbi, "God's presence is indeed everywhere; but he can not be seen; no mortal eye can behold his glory." But the emperor insisted on seeing the God of the Hebrews. "Well then," said Rabbi Joshua,

"Suppose we try to look first at one of his ambassadors." Taking him from the palace into the open air at noonday, the rabbi bade the emperor look in the sun in its noontide splendor. "I can not," said Trajan, "the light dazzles me." "Thou canst not," said Joshua, “endure the light of one of God's creatures, and canst thou expect to behold the splendor of the Creator himself! Would not such effulgence annihilate thee?"

Here is one of the meanings of the Incarnation. "Dark with excess of light," we poor finite beings could not have beheld Deity, except through the softening intervention of some medium; therefore the Son of God, brightness of his glory and express image of his person, radiance of his effulgence, and character or impress of substance, became incarnate, that in the softer morning star and diffused dayspring of the incarnation, we might be able to look on the dazzling Father of Light, and not be dazed into blindness. No man can see his face and live. Secondly: God's rear can be seen. That is to say: although we cannot behold him directly face to face in the personality of his nature, yet we can behold him indirectly as he passes by, in the footsteps of his Scripture, and the retinue of his commandments, and the trail of his providences. And none but he who prays with Moses, "Show me, I beseech thee, thy glory," can be vouchsafed a glimpse even of God's rear. "Credo ut intelligo," was the great saying of his great savant. It was the echo of his divine Master. "If anyone will do his will, he will know of the doctrine." Yes, the secret of the Lord is with them that fear him, and he will show them his covenant and the meek he will lead in judgment and teach his way. Friend, have you obeyed? Have you repented and believed in the son of God? Are you taking up your cross daily and following the Lamb of God whitherso

ever he goeth? If you have, then you have the key to such of the difficulties of Scripture as are not inherently insoluble. But if you have not obeyed the Son of God, these moral difficulties will prove a perpetual stumbling stone, and it may be a rock of perdition. God's commands, not his mysteries, are man's standard. "If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how will ye believe if I tell you heavenly things?" If I bid you do such simple things as repent and believe in me, and yet you understand not, how can you understand if I descant to you in such mysteries as predestination and the Trinity? Duty, not metaphysics is the rule of life.

This, then, is the lesson of the vision of the cleft, and indeed of my whole lecture. "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and our children for ever that we may do all the words of this law."

OLD BATTLE-FIELDS.

Long years of peace have stilled the battle-thunder,
Wild grasses quiver where the fight was won,
Masses of blossom, lightly blown asunder,
Drop down white petals on the silent gun;
For life is kind, and sweet things grow unbidden,
Turning the scenes of strife to bloomy bowers;
One only knows what secrets may be hidden
Beneath His cloud of flowers.

Poor heart, above thy field of sorrow sighing
For smitten faith, and hope untimely slain,
Leave thou the soil whereon thy dead are lying
To the soft sunlight and the cleansing rain;
Love works in silence, hiding all the traces
Of bitter conflict on the trampled sod,
And time shall show thee all earth's battle-places
Veiled by the hand of God.

I. L. COSHAM.

A cheerful face is nearly as good for an invalid as healthy weather.-Franklin.

WHAT WOMAN HAS DONE IN ART FOR ONE THOUSAND YEARS.*

The world has boasted of something which it has been

pleased to call chivalry, for near a thousand years; but we need no better evidence that this has been a false pretense and baseless assumption than the fact that anything like a candid inquest of the possibilities of woman, in the domain of intellect, has been adjourned to the latter half of the nineteenth century. And, like many another reform, waiting for ages to spring into life, this one of woman's vindication, on the basis of constitutional faculty, ludicrously overshot the limits of truth by its manifold absurdities, to block the wheels of healthy progress, and revive the elder days of darkness and depravity, when the fair handmaid of man was either a drudge or a doll.

It seems to be implied, if not affirmed, by the advance guard of woman's modern champions, that woman has a constitutional faculty and a divine calling to achieve all that man ever achieved in the domain of intellect, and that the chief reason for her failure to do this is to be found in the ungracious prohibition of her self-elected lord.

In other words, if the creed of a certain school of reformers could fully express itself, it would say: Had cruel man given woman a chance, and not imprisoned her in the kitchen and nursery, she would have written an Iliad, delivered an Oration on the Crown, composed an oratorio like the "Creation" or the "Messiah," conceived a Novum Organum, built a Parthenon or St. Peter's, carved a Theseus or Laocoön, painted a Vatican stanza or a Sistine ceiling.

Possibly you recall that good natured piece of irony to which Timothy Titcomb has given utterance, in which he solemnly defends the right of a woman to sing bass. And this happy thought suggests the whole philosophy of a healthy conservatism upon this vexed question which is exercising the knight-errantry, and the shrinking fanaticism of our times.

The right of woman to do some things is the right which you and I have to fly or to breathe under the water, and is only conditional upon the possession of wings and gills. Permission and prohibition, in some departments of activity, are ordained not by custom, but nature; in other words, not by the laws of man, but by the laws of God. Comparative anatomy can tell why woman, as a rule, can not sing bass, as why you and I can not fly or breathe under water. And, in the invisible realm of mentality, would not a spiritual scalpel sometimes detect the cause of impotence in the lack of organ rather than the lack of opportunity?

I am about to attempt a pictorial showing of the achievements of woman in the domain of the fine arts, so far as they are known, by extant specimens of her handiwork. It will be seen that the accessible light afforded in this only satisfactory method of investigation, places woman in a disadvantageous position as compared with man. What man has done in art, is revealed in extant monuments thousands of years old. But what woman achieved in this domain, anterior to the middle ages, only tradition reports. In fact, the limits of existing production, with a single exception, which I will presently specify, leave history a blank in this record from the beginning of the world down to the sixteenth century of the Christian era.

Only consider what a voluminous record of masters in the three departments of the fine arts man had made by his works ages before Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Raphael revived the splendid age of Pericles and Phidias, and you will see that in the domain of intellectual achievement, which we are considering, not only nature, but the capri

* A lecture delivered in the Amphitheater, at Chautauqua, August 19, 1881, by the Rev. J. L. Corning, of Morristown, N. J.

cious fortunes of history have treated woman with at least seeming unkindness.

Before entering upon the main purpose of this lecture, which is to trace the story of woman's achievements in art by the exhibition of extant specimens of her work, I must devote a moment to the meager records of tradition concerning her place in this department of intellectual productiveness.

The first female name of importance which the traditions of art history have handed down to the present from the far ages of antiquity, occurs, as is fitting, in the annals of Greece, where art not only, but literature as well, may be said to have had her birth.

While the palaces of Nineveh were standing in all their glory in the seventh century before Christ, there was born to Dibutades, a potter in Corinth, a daughter whose name, Kora, or Killorhoe, has become immortal in the story of art. Many of my hearers will recall the romantic story of her love and her pencil, which was yielded by its inspiration, as Pliny has written it. How on the night of parting from her betrothed, she drew his likeness on the wall in profile with charcoal, as the lamp-light threw his shadow, and how Dibutades, recognizing the portrait, filled in the outline with clay, and made the first medallion relief reproducing the lines of the human face of which history makes record. It certainly looks as if a mingling of myth were employed to flavor this bit of romance; but, like most myths, it probably has a kernel of truth in it.

The records of antiquity furnish us with little more than the names of a few other women skilled in painting, for example, Timorata, one of whose pictures representing Diana, Pliny makes mention of. Helena, who is said to have lived in the age of the Ptolemies, and to have painted a scene in the victory of Alexander the Great over Darius, which may possibly have been the model of the famous mosaic from Pompeii, representing the same subject, and now preserved in the Musee Borbonico in Naples. Among the Greek painters of antiquity, we have also the names of Kallo, Anaxandra, Cirene and Calypso; and among the Romans, the single name of Laya, who flourished about one hundred years before Christ.

The early Christian and middle ages doubtless furnished many saintly women, whose names were buried forever from public recognition in cloisters and convents, and who must have done artistic work worthy of distinct historic record in the illumination of the sacred manuscripts and missals, which are now conserved in the libraries and museums of Europe. But the one name which glorifies the artistic record of woman in the middle ages is

SABINA VON STEINBACH.

One year before Giotto, the great painter of the middle ages, saw the light, this remarkable sculptress, the reputed daughter of Erwin Von Steinbach, one of the chief builders of Strasburg Cathedral, was born. That glorious old architectural relic, which nearly fell a prey to German bomb-shells during the Franco-Prussian war, which robbed France of Alsace and Lorraine, is the conservatory of the genius of the first woman artist whose works have come down to posterity. On one of its sacred walls, under the spot where stood a work of sculpture long since destroyed, is the following inscription: "Gratia divinæ pictartis adesto Savianæ de pitra dura perquam sum facto figura." Which, being interpreted, signifies, "Thanks be to Sabina for her divine pity, by which I have been formed out of the hard stone." Every one who has visited that grand old monument of Gothic architecture and inspected its time-worn and sculptural treasures, must remember those noble statues and reliefs on the south portal of the transept, which are among the most memorable plastic accessories of architecture which the middle ages produced. Of these noble relics of

Christian art, the chief ones, representing allegorical figures of Christianity and Judaism, and the death and coronation of the Virgin Mary, are, according to reliable tradition, attributed to Sabina. The noble statue representative of the Christian church, is the principal one of the allegorical figures, and shows us an angelic female form with crowned head, the symbol of the all-conquering power and divine grace over sin and death.

Greece built temples and carved statues in honor of Nike,. the goddess of victory, and her faith and her art were carried to the grave together. But here is a symbol incarnated in stone, whose sublime meaning will never perish. More than a thousand years had passed when this statue was carved by a woman's hand, since the cross became a factor in human history; and nearly another thousand have passed since this block of stone was made to preach the Gospel.

When Christianity first started on its mission of human redemption, there were thousands-the tradition-loving Jew, the philosophic Greek, the materialistic Roman-priest, demagogue, scientist, scholar-who predicted its early death. When, more than a thousand years later, this statue was carved, such philosophy and science as there was,. echoed the ancient prophecy of infidelity, and expected that the coming age would carry Christian faith to its sepulcher. And in every generation of the thousand years, which have since elapsed, down to the present, these birds of ill-omen have hovered in the air, till to-day the sky seems almost black with the vast multitude. And yet Christianity, and the cross which she holds in her right hand and offers to humanity, still lives. And when another thousand years had passed, and another, and another, to the end of time, the glorious truth which is here symbolized, will still prove its fitness to the needs and longings of sin-burdened humanity. In the two noble reliefs representing the truth and coronation of the Virgin Mary, which, according to tradition, are credited to Sabina, we have some of the most memorable sculptures of the Gothic age.

More than a century elapsed from the death of Sabina Von Steinbach, ere the story of art was again graced with the name of a woman; and the single name which is entitled to special notice in the fifteenth century, is that of MARGARETTA VAN EYCK,

the sister of John and Hubert Van Eyck, of Bruges in Flanders, the two gifted brothers who rejuvenated the art of the north and of the south, by the discovery of oilpainting.

To the accident of her illustrious kindred, doubtless, Magaretta Van Eyck owes her immortality in the chronicles of art-history, for she was only an assistant of her brothers in a subordinate department of painting-the illumination of manuscripts. Singularly enough, the most glorious century in the annals of art science, the Periclean age, viz., the sixteenth century of the Christian era, rich beyond any other of time in great masters, was almost destitute of women entitled to any respectful consideration, either in painting or sculpture. It was reserved for the seventeenth century, when art in Italy and all over Europe had experienced a decline scarcely paralleled in its history, to furnish a few women, who in the excellence of their productions, surpassed all their predecessors. Among the foremost of these was

LAVINIA FONTANA

the principal female representative of what is known in art-history as the Eclectic School of Painting (the founders of which were the illustrious family of the Carracci) the daughter of a painter who taught Ludovico Carracci. Lavinia Fontana became in later years the pupil of her father's pupil. She was born in Bologna in 1552, and her career as an artist extends into the beginning of the seventeenth cen

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