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guardian angels of to-day must be as clearly seen and nobly hewn.

A double mental vision is as fundamental in human nature as the double
necessity for air and light. It is as obvious as that a thing can be both
written and spoken. We have maintained that the kinetoscope in the hands
of artists is a higher form of picture writing. In the hands of
prophet-wizards it will be a higher form of vision-seeing.

I have said that the commercial men are seeing alleged visions. Take, for
instance, the large Italian film that attempts to popularize Dante.
Though it has a scattering of noble passages, and in some brief episodes
it is an enhancement of Gustave Dore, taking it as a whole, it is a false
thing. It is full of apparitions worked out with mechanical skill, yet
Dante's soul is not back of the fires and swords of light. It gives to
the uninitiated an outline of the stage paraphernalia of the Inferno. It
has an encyclopaedic value. If Dante himself had been the high director in
the plenitude of his resources, it might still have had that hollowness.
A list of words making a poem and a set of apparently equivalent pictures
forming a photoplay may have an entirely different outcome. It may be
like trying to see a perfume or listen to a taste. Religion that comes in
wholly through the eye has a new world in the films, whose relation to
the old is only discovered by experiment and intuition, patience and
devotion.

But let us imagine the grandson of an Italian immigrant to America, a
young seer, trained in the photoplay technique by the high American
masters, knowing all the moving picture resources as Dante knew Italian
song and mediaeval learning. Assume that he has a genius akin to that of
the Florentine. Let him be a Modernist Catholic if you will. Let him
begin his message in the timber lands of Minnesota or the forests of
Alaska. "In midway of this our mortal life I found me in a gloomy wood
astray." Then let him paint new pictures of just punishment beyond the
grave, and merciful rehabilitation and great reward. Let his Hell,
Purgatory, and Paradise be built of those things which are deepest and
highest in the modern mind, yet capable of emerging in picture-writing
form.

Men are needed, therefore they will come. And lest they come weeping,
accursed, and alone, let us ask, how shall we recognize them? There is no
standard by which to discern the true from the false prophet, except the
mood that is engendered by con