Thus it cannot be denied that religion alone gives depth and sublimity to the creations of art, because it alone gives faith and hope in the Infinite. If we are often astonished to see the springs of artistic inspiration so rapidly exhausted in many men of genius of our own epoch, it is because of their overwhelming egotism and limited subjectivity, because the worship of the finite replaces that of the infinite, because religion has become for them a mere memory of childhood. To recover their blighted fertility of imagination, they must again become as little children, again betake themselves to the shady and lonely way leading to the temple of God. In proof of this position, we constantly find that men gifted, sensuously, with acute perceptions of the beautiful, yet who do not receive it with a pure heart, never comprehend it aright; but making it a mere minister to their desires, a mere seasoning of sensual pleasures, sink until all their creations take the same earthly stamp, and it is seen and felt that the heavenly sense of beauty has been degraded into a servant of lust. But as the spirit of prophecy consisted with the avarice of Balaam and the disobedience of Saul, so God knows all the stops of the heaven-gifted but self-corrupted artists, and, in spite of themselves, has often made them discourse high harmonies, and give the most eloquent and earnest enunciations of the very sentiments and principles in which their own condemnation could be found clearly and vividly written. The good seed, although divine, if there be no blessing upon it, may indeed bring forth wild grapes, but these grapes are well discerned, for there is, in the works of bad men, a taint, stain, and jarring discord, blacker and louder exactly in proportion to their moral deficiency. At best it is no part of our duty to examine into and pronounce upon the frail characters of men, but rather to hold fast to that which we can prove good, and feel to be ordained for our own benefit.