age petrified into an idol or a clod. But taken as it is, it
becomes transparent, and reveals the fair lines of the ideal.

The complaints of want of earnestness, devoutness, in modern Art, are as
short-sighted as Schiller's lament over the prosaic present, as a world
bereft of the gods. It is a loss to which we can well resign ourselves,
that we no longer see God throned on Olympus, or anywhere else outside
of the world. It is no misfortune that the mind has recognized under
these alien forms a spirit akin to itself, and therefore no longer
gives bribes to Fate by setting up images to it. The deity it worships
is thenceforth no longer powerless to exist, nor is there any existence
out of him; it needs not, then, to provide a limbo for him in some
sphere of abstraction. What has fled is not the divinity, but its false
isolation, its delegation to a corner of the universe. Instead of the
god with his whims, we have law universal, the rule of mind, to which
matter is not hostile, but allied and affirmative. That the sun is no
longer the chariot of Helios, but a gravitating fireball, is only the
other side of the perception that it is mind embodied, not some
unrelated entity for which a charioteer must be deputed.

We no longer worship groves and fountains, nor Madonnas and saints, and
our Art accordingly can no longer have the fervency, since its objects
have not the concreteness, that belonged to former times. But it is to
be noticed that Art can be devout only in proportion as Religion is
artistic,--that is, as matter, and not spirit, is the immediate object
of worship. Art and Religion spring from the same root, but coincide
only at the outset, as in fetichism, the worship of the Black Stone of
the Caaba, or the wonder-working Madonnas of Italy. The fetich is at
once image and god; the interest in the appearance is not distinct from
the interest in the meaning. It needs neither to be beautiful nor to be
understood. But as the sense springs up of a related _mind_ in the idol,
the two sides are separated. It is no longer _this thing_ merely, but,
on the one hand, spirit, above and beyond matter, and, on the other, the
appearance, equally self-sufficing and supreme among earthly things,
just because its reality is not here, but elsewhere,--appearance,
therefore, as transcendent, or Beauty.

To every age the religion of the foregoing seems artificial, incumbered
with forms, and its Art superstitious, over-scrupulous, bias