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The announcement of this exhibition gaVe us great pleasure . It is a new attempt , m a new place , and under new auspices . If very mnch cannot be said for its success , it is yet something , that
the attempt has been made , and we hail it as a promise of future efforts of a similar description , which will eventually lead to a perception of the moral power of art amongst many who have not hitherto been trained to appreciate its productions . Exeter Hall has scarcely yet been the scene of so pure and attractive an exhibition . It is good to find there Holy Families instead of
Trinitarian bible societies , and the heroes of Judaism or the martyrs of Christianity , instead of the declaimers of intolerance and fanaticism . The silent , peaceful , and persuasive forms which are now congregated within its walls , make us feel what the Percivals , and Gordons , and Armstrongs might have made us doubt , that JExeter Hall is indeed , an improvement upon Exeter Change .
It is no demon that has whispered to orthodoxy , « have a taste * * but a good genius , whose impulses , if heeded , will soften and civilize the savage spirit of polemical rancour . Let Calvinism fairly take to the study and the enjoyment of works of art , and we shall hope that its roughness and hardness will wear off , and that the rigid tension of its faith and feeling will relax under the
bland influence of the purest enjoyment of sense . We can forgive a little absurdity at first in the exclusion of all but scriptural subjects ; a limitation , which the collectors of these paintings , whoever they are , must have smiled at , while , by announcing it , they endeavoured to propitiate the ignorance and narrow-mindedness which it implied . It is by no means rigidly observed ;
there are many excursions into the apocrypha , both of the old and of the new dispensation , and some are admitted , the exhibition of which would probably , a > few years ago , have produced alarm and reprobation on account of their popish character , and consequent tendency to diminish people ' s horror at the concession
of the Catholic claims , and thus to prepare the way for the re >* kindling of the fifes of Smith field . A few more exhibitions , a . nd this squeamishness will be got over . Scripture or historical illustration , when aimed at , will be more efficiently accomplished , and the influences of painting will be better understood .
The abuse of painting by the Catholic church , to many of its own selfish purposes , has tended to prolong among Protestants , and especially among Protesfant dissenters , a strange insensibility to the utility of the art—we mean its utility in the highest sense of the word , the subservience of which it is capable to the im-
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EXETER HALL EXHIBITION OF PAINTINGS , IIXUSTRATIVE Ot SACRED HISTORY , BY ANCIENT MASTERS .
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_ .: ; . 338 * »
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1832, page 338, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1812/page/50/
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