I was not knowing his works for the first time; no one perhaps does
that, such is the multiplicity of the copies of them; and I vividly
remembered them from my acquaintance with the originals four decades
before, as I had remembered the Michelangelos; but in their presence and
in the presence of so many other masterpieces in the different rooms,
with their horrible miracles and atrocious martyrdoms, I realized as for
the first time what a bloody religion ours was. It was such relief, such
rest, to go from those broilings and beheadings and crucifixions and
Sayings and stabbings into the long, tranquil aisles of the museum where
the marble men and women, created for earthly immortality by Greek art,
welcomed me to their serenity and sanity. The earlier gods might have
been the devils which the early Christians fancied them, but they did
not look it; they did not look as if it was they that had loosed the
terrors upon mankind out of which the true faith has but barely
struggled at last, now when its relaxing grasp seems slipping from the
human mind.
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