From the beginning art has existed as a religion concurrent with all other religions. Obviously there can be no essential antagonism between it and them. Genuine art and genuine religion are different manifestations of one spirit, so are sham art and sham religion. For thousands of years men have expressed in art their ultra-human emotions, and have found in it that food by which the spirit lives. Art is the most universal and the most permanent of all forms of religious expression, because the significance of formal combinations can be appreciated as well by one race and one age as by another, and because that significance is as independent as mathematical truth of human vicissitudes. On the whole, no other vehicle of emotion and no other means to ecstasy has served man so well. In art any flood of spiritual exaltation finds a channel ready to nurse and lead it: and when art fails it is for lack of emotion, not for lack of formal adaptability. There never was a religion so adaptable and catholic as art. And now that the young movement begins to cast about for a home in which to preserve itself and live, what more natural than that it should turn to the one religion of unlimited forms and frequent revolutions? For art is the one religion that is always shaping its form to fit the spirit, the one religion that will never for long be fettered in dogmas. It is a religion without a priesthood; and it is well that the new spirit should not be committed to the hands of priests. The new spirit is in the hands of the artists; that is well. Artists, as a rule, are the last to organise themselves into official castes, and such castes, when organised, rarely impose on the choicer spirits. Rebellious painters are a good deal commoner than rebellious clergymen. On compromise which is the bane of all religion--since men cannot serve two masters--almost all the sects of Europe live and grow fat. Artists have been more willing to go lean. By compromise the priests have succeeded marvellously in keeping their vessel intact. The fine contempt for the vessel manifested by the original artists of each new movement is almost as salutary as their sublime belief in the spirit. To us, looking at the history of art, the periods of abjection and compromise may appear unconscionably long, but by comparison with those of other religions they are surprisingly short. Sooner or later a true artist arises, and often by his unaided strength succeeds in so reshaping the vessel that it shall contain perfectly the spirit.