Loving Lord, on me Thou smilest:
Shine, bright face, and strengthen me!
I am aware that many of my readers will demur that I am confounding Christianity with ascetic or monastic Christianity; yet I cannot read the New Testament, the Imitatio Christi, the Confessions of S. Augustine, and the Pilgrim's Progress without feeling that Christianity in its origin, and as understood by its chief champions, was and is ascetic. Of this Christianity I therefore speak, not of the philosophised Christianity, which is reasonably regarded with suspicion by the orthodox and the uncompromising. It was, moreover, with Christianity of this primitive type that the arts came first into collision.
Titian's "Assumption of the Virgin" at Venice, Correggio's "Coronation of the Virgin" at Parma.