"Ben-Hur."

Titian's representation in the picture where he is answering the woman with a piece of money seems to me one of the best, but far from satisfactory. (By the way, it is an interesting idea that the conventional Christ face is formed upon some early bust of Plato.) Frequently the attempt to make him seem different from man has resulted in making him less than human instead of more. Early artists are said to have been guided by the texts in Isaiah lii., liii., "He was more marred than any man," and "He had no beauty that we should desire him." American attempts, Carpenter's was very noble and beautiful, but its colossal size only aggravated its lack of strength, while William Page's was mushy in its sensuous and emotional softness. Tissot and Munkácsy do not break with the conventional type. Meantime many faces of the infant Jesus are entirely satisfactory, the Sistine at the head; and Murillo's little boy in the National Gallery and Holman Hunt's

Of

Jesus in the Temple are all I could desire.
I remember that Mr. George William Cur-
tis had the idea that Hunt tried to de-
velop the baby of the Sistine Madonna
into a boy of twelve. With a new sense
of the unqualified humanity of Jesus, we
shall be more likely, I think, to get some
representation of him in art that
will be more nearly what it ought
to be.

FROM THE REV. MORGAN DIX, D.D.
Rector of Trinity Church (P. E.),
New York City

a

I have great difficulty in replying: first, because the range of your inquiry is so vast; and, secondly, because the term " strong face" is so vague. When thinking of the face of our Lord in art, I go through an almost immeasurable portrait gallery: the Byzantine mosaics; the pictures of that era; the early and later Italian schools, beginning with Cimabue and ending with Perugino and Raphael; the missal paintings; the Books of Hours; the frescoes; the Renaissance; the modern French, German, English, and Spanish schools; the Rembrandts, Murillos, Titians, etc., etc. It is absolutely bewildering; and there is such an immense amount of material demanding comparison before an intelligent answer could be given, that I stop at the outset, unable to select from these any one type or specimen of which to speak.

And, then, what is a strong face? What features characterize it, as distinct from a weak one? Is it to brow, or mouth, or lips, or general cast of expression, that we are to look for hints? Again I am baffled.

I shall not attempt to answer your question. But I will add a few thoughts of mine bearing on the general subject.

test of what we are ourselves: the man who tries to tell himself or others what Christ looked like seems to me to be showing what he himself looks like to the eye of higher beings.

Two things must be kept in mind always the full, true, perfect Godhead in

It must have been the will of God that we should not know, in after years, what the Lord looked like. The wish to know is as idle as it is universal. But our ignorance on this point seems to me to give a

the face of one who was at once perfect God and perfect man. If in trying to depict it you leave either character out, your work is a failure. But who can paint the face of him who was God manifest in the flesh?

It seems to me that the strong and the weak, in human attempts at depiction, vary just as the artists themselves are strong or weak in their hold of the double truth. The worst, the most hopeless, error is that of dragging Christ down to the level of a mere man like one of us; and this loss of the idea of his Deity, together with the modern exaggerated cult of philanthropy, sweetness, good nature, etc., has produced those feeble, mawkish, sickly portraits of Christ from which I, for one, turn in impatience and disgust. Whenever and wherever, in ancient or modern art, I find a strong face of our Lord, I recognize it as strong because God, perfect God, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, is looking at me through the veil of the flesh. One word in addition. This age is asking, as no other ever asked before, about Christ; who and what he was, in himself and toward us? No one can tell the final outcome of this wild quest; wild, when conducted apart from the old answers of the Catholic Creed. But of one thing I am certain, convinced by many signs of the times: that the further the humanitarian and simply philanthropical theory is pushed, and the more the divine is eliminated in him, the weaker will the face of the Lord appear as delineated in art, and the feebler will be his hold. on the minds, consciences, and hearts of men. If he was not, at every stage of his exist ence, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, he was the greatest impostor the world ever saw, and the worship done to him is false and wrong.

I beg your pardon, first, for not answering your question, and, secondly, for inflicting on you what you may deem to be of no more value or importance than the obiter dicta of an individual little fitted to speak or write on so dread a subject as this, or so far beyond the legitimate range of our thoughts.

FROM CARDINAL GIBBONS
Of the Roman Catholic Church

Your favor of the 25th was received to-day. In reply, I beg leave to say that

the face of our Lord which I am most accustomed to see expresses both strength and kindness.

We should rather study the interior of that life, which has been, as he promised it should be, "the light of the world." For it was more by his life than by his words that he has exerted his influence over the world.

Our Saviour never inculcates any duty that he does not himself practice in an eminent degree. No matter how fast we may run on the road to perfection, he is ever before us. No matter how high we may soar, he is still above us, inviting us to ascend higher, as the eagle entices her young to fly. No matter how much we may endure in the cause of righteousness, we find him laden with a still heavier cross, and bearing deeper wounds. sweetens the most unpalatable ordinances by the seasoning of his example. Jesus taught by example before he taught by word. We are drawn toward him more by the charm of his life than by the sublimity of his doctrine and the eloquence of his speech. The sermons of our Saviour inspire us, indeed, with esteem for virtue, but his conduct stimulates us to the practice of it. Never did any man speak as Jesus spoke. admired discourse that he ever was the Sermon on the Mount. the Sermon on the Mount yields to the Sermon from the Cross. And if, like the scribes and Pharisees, our Lord had restricted his mission to the preaching of the word, without illustrating that word by his glorious example, he never would have wrought that mighty moral revolution which has regenerated the world, nor would he be adored to-day by millions of disciples from the rising to the setting When asked by the disciples of John whether he was the true Messiah, he laid more stress on his deeds than on his preaching. "Go," he says, "and relate to John what ye have heard and seen. The blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, ... the poor have the gospel preached to them."

sun.

:

The most delivered But even

in force

When we hear our Saviour saying on the Mount, "Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven," we are impressed with the sublimity of his teaching. But when we see him acting out his words, "The foxes

have holes, and the birds of the air nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head"-oh, then we are made to feel the blessedness of voluntary poverty; we cherish and embrace our Teacher, who, when he was rich, became poor for our sake. When we hear him say, "He that exalteth himself shall be humbled, and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted," we admire the virtue of humility. But when we see him at the Last Supper laying aside his upper garments, girding himself with a towel, pouring water into a basin, and washing the feet of his disciples, then that virtue assumes for us special attractions. When we hear him say, "Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy," we are delighted with his doctrine. But we are more profoundly moved when we witness his compassion for the hungering multitude in the desert, and his mercy shown to the erring Magdalen. When he says, "If you will not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive you," he is clothing an old commandment in new words. But when he prays from the cross for his executioners, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," he gives a sublime lesson of forgiveness never before exhibited by sage or prophet.

When we listen to these words: "Blessed are they that suffer persecution for justice's sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake,' we are in admiration at his doctrine. But when we behold the innocent Lamb himself accused of being a blasphemer, a seditious man, and a disturber of the public peace, we are consoled in our trials, and calumny loses its sting.

Beautiful above the sons of men was Jesus in his glorious transfiguration; but far more beautiful is he to us when suspended from the Cross. The crown of thorns is more comforting to us than the halo that encircles his brow on Mount Tabor.

FROM RABBI GUSTAV GOTTHEIL, D.D. Of the Temple Emanuel-El (Jewish), New York City I have never seen a picture of the being called Saviour of the world in which strength was a marked feature, or even indicated. Naturally so, because the

being was not a man of flesh and blood, but the creation of theological fancy and dogmatic construction. He achieved his triumph, not by bravely facing his foes, meeting force with force, but by yielding and surrendering himself to them. Logically considered (which, in so many cases, is the opposite to theologically), his enemies triumphed over him.

He is worshiped as the "gentle Jesus, the man of sorrows, the lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world, the suffering Messiah," and so forth; and with such a being strength of will and forcefulness of character are incompatible, although we all know that no evil in this evil world, worth dying for, has ever been destroyed by mere bearing it meekly. Yet it was on this kind of victory alone that the Church has built her dogma.

In so far she was right, as not a single act of what we understand by manly strength and bravery is recorded of Jesus in the Gospels. Miracles are the easiest possible method of meeting opponents successfully-provided you can work

them.

Ary Scheffer's famous picture of the Temptation expresses tremendous strength on the evil side, ideal weakness on the good. Such, I am sure, was not the man who could say to Satan, Get thee behind me! That moment (although, of course, merely symbolic) offers a situation in which a great depth of force might be reflected from forehead, eye, mouth, and figure. I am not familiar enough with all the masterpieces of the brush to say whether or not it has been attempted. But, to be true, it must of necessity be the portrait of a Jew with his racial characteristics deeply sunk in his face; and would not this be a shock to Christian sensibilities?

I shall probably be hooted at for my impudence in saying what I am going to say; I will say it nevertheless—this, namely, that Raffaello's world-worshiped Madonna always appears to me as the highest type of idealized "unnaturalness;" and that is not divine.

It looks to me (pardon the rudeness) like a mother exhibiting her baby. Their eyes are turned away from themselves; the two are not each and all to one another, as mother and child should be, and as highest types of this relation ever were in Judea: they exist for other plans and