d to have an idea of a letter of which we perceive the fine
handwriting and fair lines, without understanding the contents. The
emotions consequent upon the due perception of beauty are not given by
the senses, nor do they arise entirely from the intellect, but,
proceeding from the entire man, must be accompanied by a right and open
state of the heart. A true perception and acknowledgment of beauty is
then certainly elevating; exalting and purifying the mind in accordance
with its degree. And it would indeed seem, from the lavish profusion
with which the Deity has seen fit to scatter it around us, that it was
His beneficent intention we should be constantly under its influence.
Now the artist is one gifted by his Creator to discern that ineffable
beauty which is everywhere present, to live in the realm of the ideal,
and to reveal it to men through words, forms, colors, sounds, and, would
he insure the salvation of his own soul, through good deeds. Thus it can
be proved that 'religion is the soul of art,' and essentially necessary
to the artist, because it gives him, simultaneously, the ideas and
feelings of the Absolute, without which he must lose his way, falling
into sterile and ignoble copies of the real, like the Dutch painters,
and thus be able to produce nothing but detailed and accurate copies of
low subjects, of factitious emotions, or of vulgar sensations. Without
faith, the artist prefers the body itself to the feelings which animate
it--the polished limbs of a Venus to the brow of a Madonna! The
intellect alone can never soar to the regions of eternal truth, to the
Absolute; it must be aided by the heart in its daring flight. Faith and
love are the snowy and glittering wings of true artistic excellence.
When the soul is full of the bliss of beauty, the feeling of its
happiness urges the artist on to the necessity of imparting it,--while
his heart is wrapt in the vision of the Absolute, he would fain build
for his joyous thoughts an eternal abode with his fellow men, that they
too might see the steppings of the All Fair, and so be cheered and
stimulated in these their gloomy days of evil.

Thus it cannot be denied that religion alone gives depth and sublimity
to the creations of art, because it alone gives faith and hope in the
Infinite. If we are often astonished to see the springs of artistic
inspiration so rapidly exhausted in many men of genius of our own epoch,
it is because of their overwhelming egotism a