women with lofty ideals, prompting them to noble deeds, nerving them
to patience in suffering and courage in battle. What may not the artist
accomplish by throwing on the canvas landscapes or seascapes, like
Turner, Scripture scenes, like Raphael, or heroic deeds, like Millais?
Do these things not speak to the heart through the eye effectually? And
what refining influences may not be silently absorbed into the nature by
the artificer, who works in metals, or in pottery, in glass, or in wood,
producing shapes of graceful contour, and decoration of delicate beauty,
so that the articles of the household or the warehouse may be an
education to the mind, and become to it patterns of things in the
heavens. The command to Moses on the Mount was, concerning all the
furniture of the Tabernacle, which Bezalel and Aholiab had to construct
was, "_See that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to
thee in the mount_" (Heb. viii. 5). The beautiful things were in the
mind of God first, and then had to be produced by the inspiration of the
artist, in the house of prayer by the wisdom and deftness imparted by the
Spirit.

It is possible, we sorrow to think, to misuse the Divine gift of artistic
inspiration. The poet may devote his genius to animalism, like Byron, or
to teach immoral license, like Swinburne; the painter may crowd his
canvas with degrading ideas and vulgar representations, and the artificer
may be ingenious in the production of forms of ugliness and degrading
grotesqueness. Such desecration of great endowments is alike displeasing
to God and ruinous to the man. Of such it may be said: "_He feedeth on
ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his
soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand_?" (Isa. xliv. 20).

Thank God, that we may say truly that generally the superlatives might
have been found sitting at the feet of Jesus. The heavy, dull masses of
meaningless masonry which belonged to Egypt or Assyria, flowered into the
pure, delicate, ideality of the Greek builders, and this again developed
into the warm, spiritual, suggestive style of Christianity which has
covered Christendom with consecrated buildings like the cathedrals of
Cologne or Chartres. The art of twenty centuries has been proclaiming
the Christ as perfect in beauty, in grace and refinement, as He is
perfect in love and in sacrifice. The music of the past, in all its
highest reaches from Gregory to