Consequently, we shall find those scenes of Christ's life treated with greater advantage and more fitting effect in which He Himself has not yet arrived at the full consummation, or where His Divinity appears to be obstructed and depressed in the moment of negation. And this we find is the case in His _childhood_ and the _Passion._ That Christ as a child expresses definitely from a certain point of view the significance which attaches to Him in religion. He is God Who becomes man, and Who consequently passes through the stages of man's natural life. In another aspect of the same fact that He is presented to our minds as a child we are led to feel the practical impossibility of disclosing entirely to us all that He essentially is. And it is just here that the art of painting possesses the incalculable advantage of being able to show how the loftiness and dignity of Spirit can shine forth from the _naïveté_ and innocence of the child, which in some measure derives actual force from such a contrast, and in part, for the very reason that it is predicated of an infant, is to an infinitely less extent required by us in comparison with that we look for in Christ as man, teacher, and judge of the world. In this way the examples of Christ the babe which we find in Raphael's pictures, and above all, that in the Sistine Madonna picture at Dresden, offer us the most beautiful presentment of childhood. We are, however, aware in them also of a tendency to pass beyond merely childlike innocence, a passage which discloses quite as much the Divine already present in the opening sheath, as it enables us to surmise the expansion of such Divinity to an infinite fulness of revelation, a revelation the incompleteness of which in the child carries with it its own justification. In the Madonna pictures of Van Eyck, on the contrary, the Divine babe is the least successful feature, for they are in general stiff and emphasize the defective form of a newly-born child. It has been attempted to regard this as allegorical and intentional. They are not to be fair in aspect because it is not the beauty of the Christ babe which is that which is adorable, but the Christ as Christ. Such a mode of thought is not consonant with the true aim of Art, and the babes of Raphael regarded as works of art are in this respect of far higher rank.