Page:The Power of the Spirit.djvu/21

16 this representation—he dove is a beautiful and appropriate subject of Christian art; it is naturally, because of the Baptism of Christ, one of the most ancient symbols in the Catacombs of Rome and the earliest mosaics. In the very earliest Christian art, of the second and third centuries, the dove represents most generally the soul of the departed set free by death; sometimes also the dove, familiar to those ancient craftsmen as the bird of Venus, becomes the dove of Noah, and thus the messenger of peace after the sufferings of this life; lastly, it appears in frescoes of the baptism of Christ, and even by analogy in representations of the baptism of neophytes. Later, the symbol became restricted, because of this association, to the Holy Spirit; but in the sarcophagi and mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries the Apostles are still sometimes represented as doves, and doves sometimes stand on the arms of the cross to represent the souls of the faithful.

There is no other representation of the Holy Spirit whatever until the Middle Ages, and hardly any other then: we can applaud the artists of nearly two thousand years, and rejoice they had at hand a figure which was so obviously a mere symbol. None the less, this symbol has really become the subject of something very like idolatry among Christians; and we cannot wonder at the remark of the inquiring Japanese: 'I can understand about the Father, and I can understand about the