lutely opposed to superstition. Men make idols out of shapeless monsters, not out of works of beauty.1 The great Italian pictures and statues, even when called into the service of religion, were never used as idols. Everybody felt they represented religious facts. Superstition has always made ugliness its medium. Nobody in Italy expects a miracle from a Raphael's Madonna and Child; but crowds do from the ugly Bambino in the Church of Ara-Coeli at Rome. Nobody expected Michael Angelo's Pietà in St. Peter's to move and speak, but crowds stood agape before some hideous wooden figure that winked its eyes. There is great truth and deep philosophy in Goethe's line, "Miracle-working pictures are usually rather poor paintings." With a great religious work of art those who are capable of appreciating it are satisfied with the artistic beauty or the religious expression. Superstition works by fear, and this is best reached by the gruesome, not by the graceful.

2

But the true religious use of art is not for aid in worship. The second Commandment still remains true. God is spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. But if we are

See the description of the making of an idol in Wisdom of Solomon, xiii. 13-manifestly inspired by Isaiah.

2 Wunderthätige Bilder sind meist nur schlechte Gemälde.

Christ's, if we have given our hearts and lives to Him, if our chief desire is to know God's will and to do it, we can use every noble work of art for delight, for instruction, and praise God anew for the beauty of His world, and for the many things good and true and pure and beautiful and of good report. To the believing mind the world is essentially a beautiful world. Sin alone is the distorting chaotic element which ruins the beauty. When we know God, and love God, we see that He has made all things beautiful in His time; and we see that art can be, nay is, the sworn ally of religion in its warfare against materialism, whether it be in the speculative region, which would limit the human mind to exclusively scientific methods, or in the practical materialism, which makes the money market the test of all things. Art, not in any narrow sense, is the handmaid of religion. As Michael Angelo says, "True painting is only an image of God's perfection, a shadow of the pencil with which He paints, a melody, a striving after harmony." Yes, and if we have harmony of soul with our Heavenly Father, if we are reconciled to God in heart, all things will speak of Him, His power and wisdom and ineffable love. All things are ours, since we are Christ's and Christ is God's.

V

TRUE GREATNESS

Thou shalt have joy and gladness; and many shall rejoice at his birth; for he shall be great in the sight of the Lord.ST. LUKE i. 14, 15.

PARENTS generally desire for their children at least part of the blessing promised to Zacharias concerning his son, who became in after years John the Baptist. Not many would desire to have a John the Baptist for a son. Most would hardly know what to do with him, and would feel what a hedge-sparrow may be supposed to feel about a cuckoo among its commonplace nestlings-a bird of passage from another clime, whose ways are not our ways and whose home is not here. Parents certainly desire their children to be good, but not outrageously or fanatically good: they like the goodness to flow through traditional and conventional channels. We draw the line if it means living in the wilderness, having for raiment camel's hair and a leathern girdle, and for meat locusts and wild honey. Zacharias and Elisabeth might have been pardoned if they had desired for John a little of the

lot of those who are gorgeously apparelled and live delicately and are in kings' courts. For, of course, parents also desire for their children that they should be great; and with the thought great they naturally think of the outward tangible signs of greatness, the pride of place and the pomp of position. They would have them rise in the world: they would have them take a firmer grip of the earth and lift their heads higher and play a larger part in life than themselves.

The father, whose place is fixed and who cannot have many hopes for himself, lives again in his children, desires nothing more than to see them rise, and would give them his shoulders to help them to climb. The mother, the quietest and simplest and humblest, seeking nothing for herself, is infinitely ambitious for her son. She thinks nothing is too good for him and no place too high. If he succeeds it is because his merit is evident: if not it is because his merit is not recognised. Love is blind, they say, but love is beautiful. Many a life of failure has been sweetened and ennobled by it. Even many an ambition, mean and petty in itself, has been glorified by the pathos and the faithfulness of a mother's love. So natural and so well-known are these feelings that it has become a commonplace of speech with us to desire for parents that they may have pleasure in

their children, and for the world that it may be the better for their presence-a paraphrase of this promise to John's father. How blessed it must have been for Zacharias and Elisabeth to have all that promised and ensured, "Thou shalt have joy and gladness, and many shall rejoice at his birth; for he shall be great in the sight of the Lord.”

Yet many, if they had the wording of the blessing for themselves and theirs, would be inclined to leave out the last clause, "in the sight of the Lord." They have an uncomfortable feeling that they limit the blessing. They would ask that they themselves may have joy and gladness in their son and that many may have cause to rejoice because of him, and they would be happy at the prospect that he should be great. There they would stop with the haunting sense that "great in the sight of the Lord" carries a sting with it somewhere, and reduces the scope of all that went before.

It is true that in a sense it does limit it. It is the very real fear that this kind of greatness does not always mean great as the world counts greatness which would give many of us pause. Confess it. What is your highest desire for your children, fathers and mothers? Of course that they should be good, a pleasure to you and a profit to others; and