Outside Or San Michele in Florence you may admire the Four Holy Craftsmen, early Roman Christians martyred for refusing to make Pagan deities. They had not yet learned to baptize them by other names.
And now Salpion’s vase has reached the Museum, that cynosure of wandering tourists. But it belongs not truly to the world of glass cases: it has not yet reached museum-point. It is of the Exhibition: not of the Museum proper, which should be a collection of antiquities. Other adventures await it, dignified or sordid. For museums themselves die and are broken up. Proteus had to change his shape; Salpion’s vase has no need of external transformations. Will it fume with incense to some yet unknown divinity in the United States of Africa, or serve as a spittoon for the Fifth President of the Third World-Republic?
O the passing, the mutations, the lapse, the decay and fall, and the tears of things! Yet Salpion’s vase remains as beautiful for baptism as for Pagan ritual; symbol of art which persists, stable and sure as the sky, while thoughts and faiths pass and re-form, like clouds on the blue.
And out of this flux man has dared to make a legend of changelessness, when at most he may one day determine the law of the flux.
Everything changes but change. Yet man’s heart demands perfections—I had almost said petrifactions—perfect laws, perfect truths, dogmas beyond obsolescence, flawless leaders, unsullied saints, knights without fear or reproach; throws over its idols for the least speck of clay, and loses all sense of sanctity in a truth whose absoluteness for all time and place is surrendered.
Yet is there something touching and significant in this clinging of man to Platonic ideals: the ruder and simpler he, the more indefectible his blessed vision, the more shining his imaged grail. And so in this shifting world of eternal flux his greatest emotions and cravings have gathered round that ideal of eternal persistence that is named God.
There are two torrents that amaze me to consider—the one is Niagara, and the other the stream of prayer falling perpetually in the Roman Catholic Church. What with masses and the circulating exposition of the Host, there is no day nor moment of the day in which the praises of God are not being sung somewhere: in noble churches, in dim crypts and underground chapels, in cells and oratories. I have been in a great cathedral, sole congregant, and, lo! the tall wax candles were lit, the carven stalls were full of robed choristers, the organ rolled out its sonorous phrases, the priests chaunted, marching and bowing, the censer swung its incense, the bell tinkled. Niagara is indifferent to spectators, and so the ever-falling stream of prayer. As steadfastly and unremittingly as God sustains the universe, so steadfastly and unremittingly is He acknowledged, the human antiphony answering the divine strophe. There be those who cannot bear that Niagara should fall and thunder in mere sublimity, but only to such will this falling thunder of prayer seem waste.