If, now, all the natural wants and properties of man are symbolical--if such be his present state in the midst of creation--his whole position in the mundane system, and his high and heavenly destination, can we, or, rather, ought we, to wonder if even religion presents itself for the most part clothed in a symbolical garb? For this is the case, not merely with that which was the wild upgrowth of a poetical and purely imaginative heathenism, but also the old, original, and pure religion of nature--as the first love devoting itself for sacrifice--the second revelation of God. And so we find it to have been in the old world, or, as it is otherwise called, the old covenant. Here the first twilight of faith was yet studded with all the starry splendor of the whole symbolical creation, as it were with the brilliant diadem of nature's most glorious images. And even the new era of the ascending and brightening dawn still bears on its front the glittering morning-star of art.
But now, if still retaining the same figure, or, rather, borrowing from it a contrast, we proceed to designate art in and by itself, we may justly compare it to the moon, which illumines with its vague but marvelous _half-light_ the domain of night and the dark realms of creative fancy. Even here it is but a borrowed splendor from the true sun, a reflection from another and a higher luminary, that lights up the darkness. And while all the wonderful starry types of the spiritual world, which retire in the full day, come out in this magical twilight, so also deceptive phantoms, airy forms of gigantic magnitude, may mingle with the hovering and misty troop of shadows to which the earth-born vapors alone give birth and shape. And yet, notwithstanding this earthly intermixture, the art of the beautiful, whenever it retains its true nature, is in its essence directed to the divine. Consequently it not only lends an external charm to religion, but in its origin, in all times and peoples, it was intimately related to it, and bound to it by the strictest ties of affinity and association. And this is not the less true, even though to the eye of a severe criticism most of its productions, in the ages of its decline, may appear utterly remote from its first source and aim, and perfectly vain, worthless, and sensual.
