"The worldliness and naturalness with which the religion of the Greeks is reproached is encountered in their plastic art also. Here too the difference from the oriental is immeasurable. Organic structure takes the place of monstrosity; instead of symbolism and denotation we have what we have learned — through the Greeks — to understand as forms of nature. And yet all of these works breathe a loftiness and nobility which lifts us above the transitory and earthbound world of facts. Before our eyes a miracle takes place: the natural has become one with the spiritual and eternal, without surrendering a whit of its abundance, warmth, and immediacy in the amalgam. Should not the spirit for which exact observance of the natural led to the vision of the eternal and infinite have made the religion of the Greeks the very thing it was?"