What can Agnosticism do
against such Christianity as this? I should be shocked if anything
I had ever written or shall ever write should seem to make light of
these things. I should be shocked also if _I_ did not know how to
be amused with things that amiable people obviously intended to be
amusing.
The reader may need to be reminded that Oropa is among the somewhat
infrequent sanctuaries at which the Madonna and infant Christ are
not white, but black. I shall return to this peculiarity of Oropa
later on, but will leave it for the present. For the general
characteristics of the place I must refer the reader to my book Alps
and Sanctuaries. I propose to confine myself here to the ten or a
dozen chapels containing life-sized terra-cotta figures, painted up
to nature, that form one of the main features of the place. At a
first glance, perhaps, all these chapels will seem uninteresting; I
venture to think, however, that some, if not most of them, though
falling a good deal short of the best work at Varallo and Crea, are
still in their own way of considerable importance.
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