Page:Pleasures of England (1888).djvu/113

 new light of love which sees and tells of the mind in her,—and this neither falsely nor vainly. His love does not bestow, it discovers, what is indeed most precious in his mistress, and most needful for his own life and happiness. Day by day, as he loves her better, he discerns her more truly; and it is only the truth of his love that does so. Falsehood to her, would at once disenchant and blind him.

In my first lecture of this year, I pointed out to you with what extreme simplicity and reality the Christian faith must have presented itself to the Northern Pagan's mind, in its distinction from his former confused and monstrous mythology. It was also in that simplicity and tangible reality of conception, that this Faith became to them, and to the other savage nations of Europe, Tutress of the real power of their imagination; and it became so, only in so far as it indeed conveyed to them statements which, however in some respects mysterious, were yet most literally and brightly true, as compared with their former conceptions. So that while the blind cunning of the savage had produced only misshapen logs or scrawls; the seeing imagination of the Christian painters created, for them and for all the world, the perfect types of the Virgin and of her Son; which became, indeed. Divine, by being, with the most affectionate truth, human.

And the association of this truth in loving conception, with the general honesty and truth of the