of the Catholic faith concerning the individual, that he is, by his Divine creation and constitution, a member of a vast organism, an integral, vital, perfect part, a limb of a body of which Christ is the Head; and that he has been divinely born into an inheritance which is nothing less than the spiritual Kingdom. The Christian terminology for describing every individual is essentially organic, economic, social language. We cannot keep our hands off political economy without ignoring the first words of our Catechism, and our fundamental Christian faith concerning every human being. We can only regard a human being Christianly, we can only regard society Christianly, when we see in each human being a member of the whole sacred body, and not a mere excrescence or superfluity. Our Christianity is an economy, the economy; it is not a mere salve, or string of texts, for those who are faint or beaten amongst a horde of irresponsible scramblers or unprovided-for tramps. True, indeed, "all men are conceived and born in sin." But, greater truth than this, "God, The Son, hath redeemed me and all mankind." And it is to declare this, of all mankind-body, mind, and spirit-to declare that neither multitudes nor sin are outside the scope and power of the redeemed economy; it is to declare and effectuate this universal economy, that God the Holy Spirit consecrates and inhabits His Church.

ART AND LIFE.

BY THE

REV. PERCY DEARMER, B.A.,

Assistant Curate of St. John's, Great Marlborough Street.

"For with Thee is the Well of Life, and in Thy Light shall we see Light."-Ps. xxxvi. 9.

HOLY Church has, with a strange pertinacity, persisted in her attachment to Art, throughout the dark ages of Mammon's triumph in which our lot is cast. The dwellers in Philistia have wondered at her fanatical conduct: just as they could see nothing but money-making in Life, so they could see nothing but man-millinery in Art. "Why this ridiculous attachment to mediæval forms and ceremonies ? " they have been crying, "What more can you need in public worship, than a smooth frock-coat and a tumbler of water?" Churchmen, cankered many of them by the commercial worm, wavered. But Holy Church persisted, in the teeth of prejudice and of persecution. In the greater part of her the old lovely rites continued, with only some loss of their earlier purity; while in the very borders of the Philistines the ancient spirit flickered on; and even the Dean of Gath could not do worse than neglect his Cathedral; even the Bishop of Askelon suffered the incense to rise in silent protest to heaven, under his very nose.

And now a change has come over the thought of men. Not that art is yet revived, but men are getting

to feel that it ought to be revived. It is indeed still lost among us, but we are becoming conscious of our loss. And the result is that men are everywhere getting to be a little ashamed of having reviled the Church for so consistently holding aloft the lamp of Beauty. They are beginning to realize that she has in fact been handing on the light (just as she preserved classical literature in the Middle Ages), and that she, and she almost alone, has been keeping alive the sacred fire, such sparks of it as may still be smouldering among our people.

She could not but do this, because it is her function to maintain the wholeness and oneness, the integrity of the Catholic faith. Not, mark you, that beauty is more than one side of life and religion, but that it zs one side, and less than the whole is less than the Truth. It would have been impossible for that Body which has the abiding Spirit of God to fall away from the integrity of truth. If she had, Christ's promise, “Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world," would have been broken. It was not then a mere graceful picturesqueness that Holy Church stood up for amid the ruins of art, but an essential principle: the principle of the integrity of Life; the principle that goodness and beauty cannot be opposed; because there are not two gods, but One God, and He is the Source alike of all goodness, all beauty, all truth. "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."

The Church then has to maintain, through evil report and good report, the integrity of life. This is why she has had, in the very interests of purity, to oppose what is called Puritanism. For Purity is that which would make all things pure: Puritanism is that which would make most things impure.

And the effect of Puritanism has been, not only to divert its votaries from art, which is worship, to covetousness, which is idolatry,-not only that, but Puritanism is also responsible for the reaction against it of school after narrow school of artists, who persist in regarding art as a mere plaything for the wellto-do.

Bohemia is but a sabbath-day's journey from Philistia. Puritanism, and the reactions against it, are fundamentally alike: they alike deny our great first-principle of the integrity of life; they alike refuse to see that the artist is the fellow-worker with God— some because they do not believe in art, some because they do not believe in God, and many because they do not believe in either. The false antithesis, which popular religion suffered between goodness and beauty, has in fact driven the artist to Bohemia. Nothing else can explain the difference between the popular artist of bygone days, who "painted upon his knees," and the popular book-illustrator of to-day, whose one aim in life seems to be to exclude from his work everything whatsoever that is honest, pure, lovely, or of good report, and if there be any virtue, or any praise, not to think on these things, or to do them.

Indeed I think the danger to-day is not so much. from the Puritanism which says that Art is immoral, as from the reactionary Hedonism which says that Art is non-moral. The mawkish sentimentality in painting, for instance, or in music, which was the only kind of art that the self-styled religious world would tolerate a few years ago, has driven many people to suppose that no art is perfect without a spice of devilry. And we find critics reiterating that curious doctrine which has become memorable in one famous sentence-" The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose."

"Nothing against his prose"! Is not this just Puritanism, turned inside out? And this shallow philosophy, this sectional idea of life, that would divide every human being into water-tight compartments, is doing exactly the same bad work as Puritanism. It lowers the value, and restricts the functions of Art. It treats Art as if it were a mere decorative adjunct of life; forgetting the great principle of Plato, that "Wrongness of form and the lack of rhythm, the lack of harmony, are fraternal to faultiness of mind and character"; forgetting that decoration is but a means to an end, and that this end is the manifestation of the harmony and loveliness of the world, the grace and power of man, the unity of life, the holiness of God.

And, because they will not see that Art is the outward and visible expression of that inward mystical grace of Beauty, their foolish heart is darkened. They pursue each his own slender vein of talent; never broadening, never deepening their work, but content with incessant repetition of idea, they are killing Art by gradual dismemberment. For, though they found no school of promise for the future, they are yet followed by a host of narrow-souled imitators; and the idle crowd of ignorant admirers pick up the tricks of these poor gifted men, who neither reverence the past nor hope for the future.

What is the result? A complete divorce between Art and Life. So that, in a paper that is supposed to be enlightened, there recently appeared an article on the architecture of London, which began with the assumption (an assumption that no one has since taken the trouble to contradict) that art is only for "that portion of the community which has money to spend." What a grotesque result of the doctrine of "art for art's sake"! What an irony of fate that, having dissociated Art from God, and therefore from