WOMAN IN ART
Poets nurtured in the free and expressive breadth of this yet new world seem to have caught whispers that trees and waters recorded from soul-breathings of far remote races and times, tuned and fingered by passing winds—uninterpreted till sensitive strings of the human soul sang the beauty, truth and hungers of other souls—other lives.
"Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple,
Who have faith in God and Nature,
Who believe that in all ages
Every human heart is human,
That in even savage bosoms
There are longings, yearning, strivings
For the good they comprehend not,
That the feeble hands and helpless,
Groping blindly in the darkness,
Touch God's right hand in that darkness
And are lifted up and strengthened."
Again, another poet of introspection helps us to realize that
"Longing is God's fresh heavenward will
With our poor earthward striving."
May not this longing have been the first teaching to the soul of man, and food for his heart and thinking mind, even as a child begins to think?
We come to a sculptured art in Hellenic Greece; what does it tell us? That their pantheon of deities was the fruit of their imagination and observation of nature, and their oblations and worship were given to phenomena of nature or fancied objects crudely made by their own hands.
Their religion was man-made according to their perceptions and inheritance of ideas from yet earlier civilizations, when humanity was emerging from mere physical into the age of mental development.
We come to the meridian in the historic world; what do we find? A new religion—revealed, evolved from a life. Unlike all other lives the Man is God-equipped in mind and spirit. He is the perfected man in character, our example, for we shall be like him if we will. He lived the principles, virtues and ethics that primitive man in his ignorance and semi-developed mind must have longed for, nor realized his longing; that the philosophers taught; that school men, in time, put into books.
This and more was manifested in the daily, helpful, loving life of Jesus of Nazareth, who, when He left this earth, bequeathed to humanity the precepts for spirit development, beauty of life, and happiness.
14
