Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/670

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that from the first century until the twelfth God was not worshiped by Christians. Nay, even for fifteen centuries not a temple, not an altar was erected to him. And when he did venture to appear beside his Son in Christian art, he remained neglected and solitary. Nobody made an offering to him, or caused a mass to be said in his honor (Michelet, "Histoire de France," vol. vii. p. xlix).

But while the first Person of the Trinity has now obtained, especially in Protestant countries, a degree of recognition which he did not always enjoy, there remains behind another Person, who is more abstract, more spiritual, more undefinable than either the Father or the Son. Formally included in the liturgies of the Church, having an office established in his honor, churches dedicated to his name, this member of the Trinity has nevertheless been strangely neglected by all Christian nations. Nobody practically worships the Holy Ghost; nobody pays him especial attention; nobody appears to be much concerned about his proceedings. Artists have treated him with a degree of indifference which they have never manifested towards Jesus Christ. Not only have they sometimes forgotten to include the Holy Ghost in their representations of the Godhead, but they have omitted him even from a scene where he had the best possible claim to figure, namely, the reception of the Spirit by the apostles at the feast of Pentecost. Elsewhere they have not completely left him out, but have placed him in an attitude of subordination and indignity, evincing but scant respect, as where an artist had depicted an angel as apparently restraining the impetuosity of the dove by holding its tail in both his hands. While in the Catacombs it was the Father who was suppressed, in the Trinities of the twelfth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries it is the Holy Ghost who is found to be missing. "Thus," observes the Roman Catholic author to whom I am indebted for these facts, "the Holy Ghost has sometimes had reason to complain of the artists" (Ic. Chr., p. 489-495).

Were this Person, in fact, disposed to be punctilious, it is not only artists, mere reflectors of the general sentiment, but the whole Christian world of whom he would have reason to complain. So little does he occupy the ordinary thoughts of Christians, that Abailard gave the greatest offense by naming a mon-