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Next let us take a sonnet and a sentence from Michael Angelo:

Yes! hope may with my strong desire keep pace,

And I be undeluded, unbetrayed;

For if of our affections none finds grace

In sight of heaven, then, wherefore hath God made

The world which we inhabit? Better plea

Love cannot have than that in loving thee

Glory to that eternal peace is paid,

Who such divinity to thee imparts,

As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts.

His hope is treacherous only whose love dies

With beauty, which is varying every hour;

But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power

Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower,

That breathes on earth the air of paradise.^[13]

It is very remarkable how strongly the conviction of permanence, and the preference for the inward conception over external beauty are expressed in this fine sonnet; and also that the reason given for accepting the discipline of love is that experience shows how it "hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts." In such a love poem--the object of which might very well have been Jesus--I seem to find more of the spirit of his religion, whereby he binds his disciples to the Father that ruled within him, till they too feel the bond of parentage as deeply as himself and become sons with him of his Father;--more of that binding power of Jesus is for me expressed in this fine sonnet than in Luther's Catechism. The religion that enables a great artist to write of love in this strain, is the religion of docility, of the meek and lowly heart. For Michael Angelo was not a man by nature of a meek and lowly heart, any more than Colet was a man naturally saintly or than Luther was a man naturally refined. But because Michael Angelo thus prefers the kingdom of heaven to external beauty, one must not suppose that he, its arch high-priest, despised it. Nobody had a more profound respect for the thing of beauty, whether it was the creation of God or man. He said:

"Nothing makes the soul so pure, so religious, as the endeavour to create something perfect; for God is perfection, and whoever strives for perfection, strives for something that is God-like."

Now we can perceive how the same spirit worked in a great artist, not at Nuremberg or London, but at Rome, the centre of the world, where a Borgia could be Pope.