Let us pass from the world of religious thought, and pause for a moment on the world of artistic thought. Now to Art, perhaps more than in any other department of the human intelligence, the ideal is necessary for life. All men have wondered from time to time why the architecture--to take one case only--why the architecture of the past is so much more wonderful, so much more beautiful, than the architecture of the present. When you want to build some great national building to-day you have to go back to Greece, or Rome, or the Middle Ages for your model. Why is it that you have no new architecture, expressive of your own time, as that was expressive of the past? The severe order of Egypt found its expression in the mighty temples of Karnak; the beauty and lucidity of Grecian thought bodied itself out in the chaste and simple splendor of Grecian buildings; the sternness of Roman law found its ideal expression in those wondrous buildings whose ruins still survive in Rome; the faith of the Middle Ages found its expression in the upward-springing arch of Gothic architecture, and the exquisite tracery of the ornamented building. But if you go into the Gothic cathedral, what do you find there? That not alone in wondrous arch and splendid pillar, upspringing in its delicate and slender strength from pavement to roof, not there only did the art of the builder find its expression. Go round to any out-of-the-way corner, or climb the roof of those great buildings, and you will find in unnoticed places, in hidden corners, the love of the artist bodying itself forth in delicate tracery, in stone that lives. Men carved for love, not only for fame; men carved for beauty's sake, not only for money; and they built perfectly because they had love and faith, the two divine builders, and embodied both in deathless stone. Before you can be more than copyists you must find your modern ideal, and when you have found it you can build buildings that will defy time. But you have not found it yet; the artist amongst us is too much of a copyist, and too little of an inspirer and a prophet. We do not want the painter only to paint for us the things our own eyes can see. We want the artist eye to see more than the common eye, and to embody what he sees in beauty for the instruction of our blinded sight. We do not want accurate pictures of cabbages and turnips and objects of that sort. However cleverly done, they remain cabbages and turnips still. The man who could paint for us the thought that makes the cabbage, he would be the artist, the man who knows the Life. And so for our new Art we must have a splendid ideal. Do you want to know how low Art may sink when materialism triumphs and vulgarises and degrades? Then see that exhibition of French pictures that was placed in Bond Street some years ago, which attracted those who loved indecency more than those who loved the beautiful, and then you will understand how Art