Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/669

 place occupied by the history of Jesus in ecclesiastical fast-days and feast-days. We have the Annunciation, the Nativity, the forty days of Lent, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, all referring to him. But we have quite forgotten to celebrate the creation of the human species, the expulsion from Eden, the deluge. the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and other mighty works due to his Father. The weekly holiday, originally a memorial of his repose on the seventh day, has indeed been retained from Judaism; yet even here its reference has been changed from the history of the first person to that of the second by its transfer from the last day of the week to the first. But this is not all. Didron remarks that in early works of art Jesus is made to take the place of his Father in creation and in similar labors, just as in heathen religions an inferior divinity does the work under a superior one. Dishonorable and even ridiculous positions were assigned to God the Father. The more ancient artists were reluctant to paint the whole of the First Person, just as Africans, Peruvians and Hebrews were reluctant to speak his name. A mere hand or an arm is held sufficient to represent him. But in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, God the Father begins to manifest his figure; at first his bust only, and then his whole person. In the fourteenth century we take part in the birth and development of the figure of the eternal Father. At first equal to his Son in age and station, he begins in process of time to become slightly different, until, towards 1360, the notion of paternity is attached irrevocably to him; he is thenceforth uniformly older than his Son, and assumes the first place in the Trinity. The middle age may be divided (according to Didron) into two periods. In the first, preceding the fourteenth century, we have the Father in the image and similitude of the Son. In the second, after the thirteenth century until the sixteenth, Jesus Christ loses his iconographic distinctness, and is conquered by his Father. He in his turn puts on the likeness of the Father, becoming old and wrinkled like him (Ic. Ch., p. 148-203. Basing his conclusions on these remarkable disclosures, Michelet, in his "History of France," observes with considerable reason

Ch., p. 572 n.]
 * [Footnote: Catholic writer, to whom I am much indebted for this and other hints.—1c