WOMAN IN ART
Art is an absolute failure if soul is lacking, for art is an expression of the soul of man through the medium of his choice, as the creature man is an expression of the Creator in the medium of his choice—body, mind, and spirit.
It is the spirit, the ideal that sets the value. Art, then, is a success in proportion to the soul equipment of the artist who conceives the idea and works it out, for character and art are inter-dependent and the subject no less than the worker must have its individuality.
A tiny boy expressed it as he watched his grandfather build a fire in the big fire-place. With arms folded behind him he soliloquized thus: "De thmoke make de blaze, and de blaze make de thmoke, and da boaf make each ovver—an' den dares a fire."
Fancy life to be a constantly unrolling tapestry depicting human development; through it runs the ever increasing thread of soul in the life of woman.
Saint Paul was a plain, practical man, and the only art he practiced, so far as we know, was that of tent-making. He lived in a time when civilization garbed itself in pagan splendor; when lustful pleasures were the religion of Greek and Roman; in a time when moral death masqueraded as life, flaunting itself throughout the exquisite world that sloped to the blue and sparkling waters of the Middle Sea. Paul lived when purity seemed to exist only in the air, vibrant with warmth and light, in the waters pulsating with dreams of color, and in gleaming marbles of Parian whiteness, that adorned the groves of Daphne, of Arcadia and the Isles of the Aegean Sea, and crowned with sculptured majesty Mount Olympus and the Acropolis.
Paul had keen insight, he saw beneath the surface. The beauty of holiness had been revealed to him in the way—so as by fire did the spirit-light of heaven enter his soul, as he entered Damascus, and at the bidding of the Spirit he set about shedding spirit-light in a world of spirit darkness.
It is hard for the twentieth century Christian to realize the moral darkness of the first. In those days woman did not count for much; an accessory to man's pleasure if she had a comely face and figure, a drudge or a thing loathsome if she had not, but for the most part a caretaker without appreciation or reward; ignorant of the germ of spiritual beauty within her being, except, perhaps, of "that nameless longing for something better than she had known," that longing which is the embryo of life, love, and immortality.
Paul labored and there flocked to hear him "of honorable women not a few"; and they, having gained through his teaching the secret of soul-development, of true peace that passeth knowledge, labored with him as only woman can
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