that Art consisted in going beneath the material surfaces that reflected light, or the material events that happened, in painting and literature respectively, and, by a process of selection, of symbolizing (not photographically representing) the Ideas beneath the Things—­the Substance beneath the Accidents—­the Thought beneath the Expression—­(you can call it what you like).  Zola in literature, Strauss in music, the French school of painting—­these reduced Realism ad absurdum.  Thus once more the Catholic Church, in this as in everything else, was discovered to have possessed the secret all along.  The Symbolic Reaction therefore began, and all our music, all our painting, and all our literature to-day are frankly and confessedly Symbolic—­that is, Catholic.  And this too, you see, pointed to the same lesson as Psychology, that beneath phenomena there was a Force which transcended phenomena; and that the Church had dealt with this Force, knowing It to be Personal, through all her history.

“Finally—­and this was the crowning argument of all, that correlated all the rest—­there was the growing scientific and popular perception of the Recuperative Power of the Church—­that which our Divine Lord Himself called the Sign of the Prophet Jonas, or Resurrection.

“There were of course countless other lines of advance, in practically every science, and they all pointed in the same direction, and met, so to speak, from every quarter of the compass the end of the tunnel which the Church had been boring through all the heaped-up stupidities and ignorances of man.  Psychology tunnelled, and presently heard the voices of the exorcists and the echoes of Lourdes through the darkness.  Human religions tunnelled—­Hinduism with its idea of a Divine Incarnation, Buddhism with its coarse apprehension of the Eternal Peace of a Beatific Vision, North American Religion with its guesses at Sacramentalism, Savage Religion with its caricature of a Bloody Sacrifice; all from various points; and presently heard through the tumult the historical dogma of the Incarnation of Christ, the dogma of Eternal Life, the Sacramental System and the Sacrifice of the Cross—­all proclaimed in one coherent and perfectly philosophical Creed.  Ideals of Social Reform met with the same experiences.  The Socialist with his dream of a Divine Society, the Anarchist with his passionate nightmare of complete individual liberty, both ran up together, in the heart of the black darkness, against the vast outline of a Divine Family that was a fact and not a far-off ambition—­a Family that fell in Eden and became a competitive State; a Holy Family that redeemed Nazareth and all the world; a Catholic Family in whom was neither Jew nor Greek, nor masters against men—­in whom the doctrine of Vocation secured the rights and the dignities of the Society on one side and the Individual on the other.  Finally Art, wandering hither and thither in the mazes of Realism, saw light ahead, and found in Catholic Art and Symbolism the secret of her life.