Introductory. 



for beauty, in their worship of the body, people were 

 impelled beyond the bounds of the primitive Christian 

 ideal ; and their love became a strange idolatry, a strange 

 rival religion. It was the return of that ancient Venus, 

 not dead, but only hidden for a time in the caves of 

 the Venusberg, of those old pagan gods still going to 

 and fro on the earth, under all sorts of disguises."* 



It is then here contended that the whole modern move- 

 ment from the humanists of the Renaissance to the pre- 

 sent day has been and is a pagan revival ; the reappear- 

 ance of a passionate love for and a desire to rest in and 

 thoroughly sympathise with mere nature, accompanied by 

 a more or less complete and sympathetic rejection of the 

 supernatural, its aspirations, its consolations, and its terrors. 



But to this position at least two objections may be 

 made. First, it may be said that many sincere and 

 thorough Christians have been profoundly imbued with 

 a love of nature, as was especially the case with the 

 seraphic father, the great St. Francis. Secondly, it may 

 be objected that the modern period has been largely re- 

 ligious, and that the movement of the Reformation has 

 been here unjustly and unreasonably ignored. 



To the first objection it may be replied, there are two 

 ways of loving and regarding nature. 



St. Francis, the tenderly beloved and unspeakably 



* " Studies in the History of the Renaissance." By Walter H. 

 Pater, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. 



