them, and often because of the natural shrinking from speaking of the affairs of the soul. Most men have an "Achilles' heel" of musical susceptibility, notwithstanding "not knowing one tune from another." It is like a dormant seed in most men; but it can be nurtured with patient persistence to fruitage; the growth is often unconscious, to be sure, but the organ can carry on from Sunday to Sunday a saving and subtle work, like sunlight and dew. It can go far to bring rest and repose into the heart and mind, and this is, indeed, much in our day; for rest and repose are prerequisite to all fruits of the spirit.

One shining shadow we see at the very outset: Church-organ music should always have a spire! As, to the eye, that heavenward suggestion should always be instant and unmistakable both in the interior and the exterior of the church edifice, so should the music of the organ lead, through the ear, to divine worship. The organ should be harmonious with this purpose, to eye as well as ear. To many, organs look like grocery-store windows, just as many churches in outward aspect are in danger of being mistaken for fire-engine houses. The organ music should always have a spire; even as the choir music should always have a chime, and both together should constitute a chancel in tone expression and impression.

Organ music in the church must be regarded in no sense and at no time as a performance; the organist is not in office as a virtuoso, but as a ministrant; his sacred message is his concern; he must efface himself. All thought of admiration for himself or his organ must be put away. He is to prepare the congregation for worship and aid them in this. Display of his own skill or of his organ blocks the educative power or any power of churchly influence. On the other hand, his competency fine and refined perceptions and abilities - his mastery of himself and his art, must be sufficient to give this power inherent in his art and his instrument free and full exercise. He ought to be a man of spiritual fitness; not only an organist but a musician, not only a musician but a church musician in gift and training, not only that, even, but a man in a suitable and essential sense no narrow or prudish

sense.

The organ music should have a spire. The prelude is not for bait; nor is it a pastime in the interest of chronic laggards; the offertory is not for entertainment; the postlude should not be fireworks. The music should be clean of all suggestion of the worldly ways, free from associations even with secular usage and surroundings. It should not be conspicuously ornate or scholastic, but it should be a message eloquently delivered. Habit has reduced the postlude generally to a

perverted opportunity; its possibility is a peculiar power, seldom used; and this is not all the fault of the organist, by any means. The prelude has a latent power for spiritual preparation by no means always utilized by the congregations.

The music that is used should be true to its purpose; not simply good art sound, sane and strong, but church art; not pretty, or pleasing, or sweet, or sentimental, but of earnest sentiment, true to its purpose. Simple it may be, but noble, elevated, uplifting, worshipful.

You remind me, perhaps, that worship is essentially praise; yes, and there is place for praise in the organ music, not boisterous and bombastic and blatant hurly-burly, but dignified, and majestic, poiseful solid and massive, telling of the glory of God and not the vainglory of man. Praise is reached or developed through confession, and prayer, and adoration; all the fruits of devout and meditative moods.

There must be peace within the hearts and minds of the congregation, through penitence and prayer; hence let the organist minister with sympathetic insight and reverent imagination. He shall select and interpret from his soul-self, mindful of the power that is his to administer and of the soul-selves that he is helping to develop, or otherwise helping to stifle or to starve. He must play from conscience.

And so must the congregations cultivate conscience in this question of the organ music, and give unceasing heed thereto. The good harvest requires both seed and soil of the best. Music committees should be elected in this spirit, and in turn they should select their organist in like spirit.

Many a worthy man is turned from the true path of power and ministration, or is spoiled in the making, by the pressure of pleasing that is put upon him by committees and their constituents. But we are gradually throwing off this bondage; many a parish, or members thereof, have seen the light. Many a loyal soul is ministering to this end. The tide of the spirit is coming in! No clearer sign of this than this very assembly. Even as we must bestow all possible reverence of imagination and skill into the making of God's house, so we must do our utmost to enable His voice to be heard and heeded; and one of the powers to this end, precious and unlimited, is enshrined for us in the organ.

THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF THE ART OF THE GREAT

PAINTERS

REV. HENRY G. SPAULDING

ART LECTURER, BROOKLINE, MASSACHUSETTS

The relation of this art to ethical and religious culture is as obvious and as direct as that of literature or music, and its high educative value is at once apparent if we take the end and aim of religious education to be the training of the whole man in life's great school. What, then, has been the actual connection between religion as thus defined and the art of the great painters?

In the first place, Renaissance painting put before the mind of Christendom the poetic aspects of its religion. By means of his immortal parables, which are pictures in words, Jesus portrayed various aspects of the divine kingdom, making his appeal to the imagination of his hearers. In like manner the great artists of the Renaissance painted upon their canvas scenes and events taken from the popular Christian mythology, from the legends of the saints, or from the biblical narratives themselves, which for them, as artists, belonged less to the realm of historic fact than to that of the religious imagination. Take, for example, the whole cycle of scenes and events from the life of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Our gospels give us only a dim and shadowy outline of certain portions of that life. But in Christian art we have the richly illustrated biography, so to speak, of a woman who is the personification of all female loveliness and excellence, all wisdom and purity. With a boundless avidity for the picturesque, these painters found another rich storehouse of subjects in the introductory chapters of the first and third Gospels. The "holy night" of the Saviour's birth is transformed, in Correggio's famous picture, into a spiritual vision in which the thought of the Christ as the Light of the world is expressed by the mystic radiance emanating from the body of the holy Child and shedding a glory even upon the angels who hover above the manger.

For their pictures of other scenes of the Christmas story these Renaissance painters found poetic suggestions in the Gospel narratives. In the time when the synoptic Gospels took their present shape the fervent imagination of the early church had already pictured the advent of the Messiah as a drama in which heaven and earth united their creative splendors. The artists' vivid appeal to the eye turned the old

Scripture into new poetry and fixed the visions in enduring forms. Their paintings turn the story of Bethlehem into a new evangel of peace and good will. As we look at these wondering shepherds and these kneeling Magi, we seem to see a great world-company of the lowly and the lofty moving, in one vast procession, to offer tribute and render homage to the condescending, great God, who incarnated himself in human childhood.

In ways like these the art of the great painters set in a new light the poetic aspects of the Christian faith. Blot from the Gospels the pictorial parables of Jesus and take Christian art from history, and you rob the religion of Christ of some of its most precious treasures. A faith that made no appeal to the spiritual imagination, an ideal of holiness that burst upon the world trailing no" clouds of glory as it came," would be a poor substitute for the Christianity which we now have, and which, as we see the fair semblances of its inspiring ideals glowing on the painter's canvas, is like a morning in the spring, sweet with the lingering fragrance of the early flowers and sparkling with the meadow grasses still wet with the dew.

But the art of the Renaissance rendered another, and even more important service to Christianity. The great painters anticipated, in part, our modern attitude toward the Bible. We no longer look upon the Bible as an arsenal of proof-texts bristling with weapons for theological warfare. Nor is it chiefly valuable to us as a collection of ancient records regarded merely as the history of one chosen race. We study it as a great nation's religious literature; but we prize it for the principles which it sets forth in living presentations. It contains, as no other book, a wealth of symbolical, pictorial, and suggestive truths which are translatable into the common speech of present-day conduct. It abounds in allegories in which, as in Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," we may read the story of the soul's inward struggles and of its conflicts with the world without. Our sorrows are there to be comforted; our joys, to be hallowed; our temptations, to become the tests of a victorious manhood. It tells us of strenuous faith that wins the crown; of buoyant and patient hope; of helpful love, which, passing through the clarifying alembic of the consecrated soul, becomes a love divine, "that stoops to share man's sharpest pang, his bitterest tear."

This higher valuation of the Bible was felt and acted upon by the great painters. They would have had little patience with the pietistic literalism which seeks to understand and interpret the New Testament by studying the altered scenery of the Holy Land and associating with the Arabs of modern Syria. "Christ and his Apostles," the art critic,

Mr. Beranson, has well said, " were to these painters the embodiment of living principles and living ideas. They could not think of them otherwise than as people of their own kind, living under conditions easily intelligible to themselves and their fellow-men. The more familiar, then, the look and surroundings of Biblical and saintly personages, the more would they drive home the principles and ideas which they incarnated." It is easy to carry this view of the matter too far. We read ourselves into the men whom we read about; and we think that what we find, or what finds us, in a book or in a picture is what the author or the painter put into it. But, with all allowance for mistakes of this sort, we cannot fail to see that these Renaissance painters brought the old stories and the old-time events out of the dead Past and set them with intelligible forms and warm colors into the midst of the living Present. In doing this the artists, unconsciously perhaps, but none the less effectively, detached ideas and ideals from the written records and brought them close to our common human sympathies.

How full of meaning, too, are the great painters' representations of scenes from the ministry of Jesus! What a rebuke was given to the carping judgments of living sinners when the woman taken in adultery makes her mute appeal to the merciful Galilean in the midst of a company composed, not of ancient Jews, but of the sensualists and libertines of his own day and his own city! Even the painful scenes of Passion Week make a deeper impression as those who looked upon the pictures recognized the place as their own neighborhood, and saw, in the brutal, angry throng, their fellow-citizens; for, in this way, it was borne in upon their minds that they and such as they might crucify their Lord afresh. Or, turn again to the Madonna pictures by the Great Masters. To his vision of the Eternally Feminine, Dante had raised, in the Paradiso, his hymn of praise:

"Whatsoe'er may be

Of excellence in creature, pity mild,
Relenting mercy, large munificence,
Are all combined in thee."

In many of the masterpieces of Renaissance paintings this gracious and beautiful creation of religious poetry and Christian mythology, the Madonna the Mother, whose heart of joy is shadowed by the sorrows which her Babe one day must bear expresses, as no dogma of the creeds ever expressed, the essential meaning of that self-forgetting, self-sacrificing love of which the Cross is the abiding symbol.