In very truth, one of the worst signs of the vanishing of the gift of Imagination in these days is the utter inability of the majority of modern folk to understand its value. The creative ease and exquisite happiness of an imaginative soul which builds up grand ideals of life and love and immortality with less effort than is required for the act of breathing, seems to be quite beyond their comprehension. And so--unfortunately it often follows that what is above them they try to pull down,--and what is too large for them to grasp, they endeavour to bind within their own narrow ring of experience. The attempt is of course useless. We cannot get the planet Venus to serve us as a lamp on our dinner table. We cannot fit the eagle into a sparrow’s nest. But some people are always trying to do this sort of thing. And when they find they cannot succeed, they fall into a fit of the spleen, and revile what they cannot emulate. There is no surer sign of mental and moral decadence than this grudging envy of a great fame. For the healthy mind rejoices in the recognition of genius wherever or whenever it may be discovered, and has a keen sense of personal delight in giving to merit all its due. Hero-worship is a much finer and more invigorating emotion than hero-slander. The insatiate desire which is shown by certain writers nowadays, to pull down the great reputations of the past, destroy old traditions, and cheapen noble attainment, resembles a sudden outbreak of insane persons who strive to smash everything within their reach. It is in its way a form of Imagination,--but Imagination diseased and demoralized. For Imagination, like all other faculties of the brain, can become sickly and perverted. When it is about to die it shows--in common with everything else in that condition,--signs of its dissolution. Such signs of feebleness and decay are everywhere visible in the world at the present time. They are shown in the constant output of decadent and atheistical literature--in the decline of music and the drama from noble and classic forms to the repulsive “problem” play and the comic opera--in the splashy daubing of good canvas called “impressionist” painting--in the acceptance, or passive toleration, of the vilest doggerel verse as “poetry”--and in the wretched return to the lowest forms of ignorance displayed in the “fashionable” craze for palmistry, clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, and sundry other quite contemptible evidences of foolish credulity concerning the grave issues of life and death,--combined with a most sorrowful, most deplorable indifference to the simple and pure teachings of the Christian Faith. Even in the Christian Faith itself, its chosen ministers seem unable to serve their Divine Master without quarrelling over trifles,--which is surely no part of their calling and election.