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 and limited subjectivity, because the worship of the finite replaces that of the infinite, because religion has become for them a mere memory of childhood. To recover their blighted fertility of imagination, they must again become as little children, again betake themselves to the shady and lonely way leading to the temple of God.
In proof of this position, we constantly find that men gifted, sensuously, with acute perceptions of the beautiful, yet who do not receive it with a pure heart, never comprehend it aright; but making it a mere minister to their desires, a mere seasoning of sensual pleasures, sink until all their creations take the same earthly stamp, and it is seen and felt that the heavenly sense of beauty has been degraded into a servant of lust. But as the spirit of prophecy consisted with the avarice of Balaam and the disobedience of Saul, so God knows all the stops of the heaven-gifted but self-corrupted artists, and, in spite of themselves, has often made them discourse high harmonies, and give the most eloquent and earnest enunciations of the very sentiments and principles in which their own condemnation could be found clearly and vividly written. The good seed, although divine, if there be no blessing upon it, may indeed bring forth wild grapes, but these grapes are well discerned, for there is, in the works of bad men, a taint, stain, and jarring discord, blacker and louder exactly in proportion to their moral deficiency. At best it is no part of our duty to examine into and pronounce upon the frail characters of men, but rather to hold fast to that which we can prove good, and feel to be ordained for our own benefit.
It can, moreover, be fully proved that the artists, as a class, have never been false to religion. From the poets of the dark ages sprang a literature strange and marvellous, but full of naive faith, and bearing striking witness to the activity of the human spirit even in those dim centuries: I mean the literature of 'visions and legends.' And to estimate the importance of these consolatory creations aright, we must remember how precarious and miserable life then was, passed in constant privation and poverty, menaced with increasing perils; and then consider the fact that these legends kept constantly before the mind of the oppressed people the consoling idea of a superintending Providence, who numbers all our tears and hears our lightest sighs. The legend indeed never confined itself wholly to this earth as the theatre of its wild drama; immortality was always its groundwork, and its last scene always opened in the invisible world, where the saints were surrounded with undying halos of glory, and from whence they watched over men with increasing love, while in their midst reigned a gentle figure full of grace and majesty, uniting, in a mysterious and ineffable manner, the holy virginity and sacred maternity of woman; a gentle, humble being, through whose innocent meekness the two worlds, finite and infinite, had been forever linked in the person of the infant God, whom she forever bore upon her virgin bosom. What a tender lesson for barbaric life!