er's picture, the entrancing splendor and illusion of dramatic art-these are sacramental to the man whose eye is fixed on beauty and on that alone; ay, and a thousand times more sacred and inspiring than many a preacher's word or priest's most solemn ritual.

As the Romanist, so the rationalist, has his sacrament of death. But it is no magic of extreme unction, and hardly more is it the words of gratitude and consolation that are spoken over the silent form which can respond no more to our caresses. Death is itself the sacrament, the unspeakably wonderful and solemn and mysterious thing. It is a sacrament of memory and hope; a sacrament in which there is a real transubstantiation: our actual friend, becoming an ideal presence in our lives, and legislating for us many a law of meekness and forbearance. Our jealousies and animosities—they cannot breathe in that pure atmosphere where we commingle with our dead. Life is too short for such things, we discover, and stretch out alienated hands above the silent form, so potent though so motionless.

So many words, and what do they amount to after all? Simply to this, that, to the rational religionist, Life is the sacrament of sacraments; the sacred thing inclusive of all others—birth, youth, and love, and work and beauty, thought and death, all these, and much beside that must remain unnamed. Life is the one great sacrament; the one great solemn, beautiful, and sacred thing. Only it is no sacrament for us save as we know its meaning; save as we understand its laws and

give to them a swift and glad obedience. Be this the goal of our endeavor, and then, be sure, we shall not greatly miss the formal sacraments of any church, nor fail, if, as we hope and trust, there is a larger life beyond, to enter on it well equipped for every task it can provide, and well prepared for every joy it can bestow.

THE ART OF LIFE.

THE arts of life are many, but the Art of Life is one. One made up of many, certainly, but still one. We divide the arts of life into fine and useful.

they are

For this

The useful arts again are many. The fine arts are comparatively few. As commonly enumerated, they are Painting, Sculpture, Music, Architecture, Poetry, and Eloquence. But this enumeration is not a complete one. We are obliged to add the fictile and the textile arts, and the various arts of household decoration. These can not be excluded from the list of fine arts because all superinduced upon a ground of use. test would exclude architecture also. well as eloquence, has been called a mixed art, because sometimes its end is principally use, at others principally beauty. The same is true of the fictile and the textile arts, and of what is now called household art. But no art we now call fine, however exclusively so, was a fine art in its initial stage. All had their origin in use. The first poetry was a mere device for memorizing the names and feats of ancestors. The first sculpture

This, as

was a strictly useful art-that is, not an end in itself, but a means of honoring one's ancestors or the gods. Did the sentiment of beauty have any thing to do with the making of all those innumerable statues that you see over in the Cesnola collection at the Metropolitan Museum in New York? Nay, rather the sentiment of filial piety. If beauty was intended, both mind and hand refused to second the intention. So again use, and not beauty, religious use, was the parent of the twin arts of music and dancing. This makes it the more strange that our Quaker friends should object to music, and our Calvinistic friends to dancing. The first architect was the first man who bent the boughs of several trees together to make a sort of tent; and even the first temples were built, not for the sake of beauty, but to house the statues of the gods. Use indeed is the secret of all civilization. Think you the sciences originated in any love of science, knowledge, as such? No more than the arts originated in the love of beauty. "How to fix the religious festivals; when to sow; how to weigh commodities in what manner to measure ground-were the purely practical questions out of which grew the sciences of astronomy, mechanics, geometry." Ye that love art and science, and despise use, know that without the spur of use there would have been no art, no science, in the world. From that plain-featured mother have been born all of these beautiful and godlike arts and sciences. The distinction between useful and fine arts is

* Spencer : Illustrations of Universal Progress," p. 188,