CONCLUSION 275 



material world. Another group in Rome is to 

 my mind truer to the facts of human life, albeit 

 some of the greatest of those facts are in the 

 future. In the Church of the Cappuchini is 

 Guido's painting of St. Michael and the Dragon. 

 Upon the angel's face the sunlight rests. Eternal 

 youth flashes from his eyes and breathes from his 

 body ; beneath his feet, prostrate and helpless, 

 is the dragon, with the spear of light at his head. 

 It is the victory of good over evil. The marble 

 group is the symbol of what life would be without 

 God revealed in Christ, and of what it now seems 

 to those who have no faith ; the painting is the 

 symbol of what it is to men of spiritual vision. 

 Between the two symbols stretch, no doubt, ages 

 of toil and conflict, of struggle and death ; but 

 nature's laws are not merciless ; they are expres- 

 sions of Him who Himself is love ; and sometime 

 eternal Love will realize the ideal depicted in the 

 painting. Sometime the race, purified and re- 

 newed by vital relations with Hirn who is the life, 

 will bless the sweep and universality of that law 

 which often now works so mysteriously and fate- 

 fully, the law which conserves the blessings of the 

 generations, accumulates them, and sends them 

 down in streams of light to make glad generations 

 yet to come. Then what seem now to the faith- 



