" He taught that joy is a thing of the spirit. He made it plain
that loss, disillusion, and defeat are the penalty of affections set on
the outside of things. The materialist is in prison.
He did not condemn the earth; He taught that its true loveliness is to
be discerned only by the spiritual eye. For Him the earth was a symbol,
and the whole realm of nature a parable.
I cannot but think that we are never further from the genius of the
Christian religion than when we treat this luminous atmosphere as
though it were a foreign envelope, of little account so long as the
substance it enshrines is retained intact. Without it, the
substance, no matter how simple or how complex, becomes a dry
formula, dead as the moon.
Losing the radiance we lose at the same time the central light from
which the radiance springs, and our religion, instead of
transforming the corruptible world into its incorruptible
equivalents, reverts to the type it was intended to supersede and
becomes a mere safeguard to the moral law.
Nothing can allay our present discords and the long confusions of the
world, short of "those radiant conceptions of God, of man, of the
universe, which are the life and essence of Christianity."
"Liberty," says Edouard Le Roy, "is rare; many live and die and have
never known it." And Bergson says, "We are free when our acts proceed
from our entire personality, when they express it, when they exhibit
that indefinable resemblance to it which we find occasionally between
the artist and his work.
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