Art and religion are both concerned with life and so they both must touch evil and ugliness, unhappily a large part of life. Religion as a virtue must overcome evil and not permit it to master the will. Art depicts evil in such a way as not to offend the enlightened mind, by approval of evil or by the artistically unjustified introduction of evil or by actual experience of evil. In all these cases the mind would not experience the true and lasting pleasure of art. The taste of fruit passes; the contemplation of painted fruit is a joy forever. Art pleasure is not the playing with toys, as Plato would seem to make it, but the fine occupation of rational minds, which Aristotle made it, an occupation worthy of man because art interprets nature and man to himself, because art exercises man’s rational faculties, because art releases man’s emotions under conditions where the evil of actual life is removed. Macbeth and Œdipus in life were saddening spectacles; the echo of that sadness felt through dramatic representation has high pleasure for the mind. The cathartic function of art brings it close to the virtuous and the divine. What virtue does really, art does ideally, transforming evil into good. The vicarious sacrifice of Calvary was the catharsis of mankind, an infinite cleansing, compared with which the vicarious feeling of dramatically enacted evil is but as a drop to the ocean. Close to the divine, too, although at the same time infinitely remote, is the creation of art. Wisdom and love inspired God in His creation, but so also did the quest of beauty. Aquinas called the universe God’s sermon, and the universe is a divine picturing and sculpturing and harmonizing. The artist follows far after, rethinking through finite images the ideals which filled the thoughts of the Divine Artist. In idealizing, in creating, is art akin to the divine, and, lastly, in its disinterestedness is art divine. All appreciation of beauty is divine. Contemplation will be the occupation of eternity, and contemplation is the proper and the congenial attitude of the soul towards beauty. Good inspires love and attracts to union, but when union has been effected in eternity, the enraptured ecstasy of the beautiful will be the soul’s unending activity. Beauty is the supreme excellence of truth, the polish on the granite of fact, the uncloying fascination arrested upon perfection. In eternity infinite good and infinite truth, obscured in time, will stream into the soul unclouded and refulgent, and beauty will grace love and crown wisdom.