At the outset it seemed as if the religious warfare had a certain advantage over the esthetic--it agitated more people, and seized men in their idiomatic and innermost interests, while, on the other side, but small and select circles participated in partisan questions and controversies respecting art. But it looks now as if it would soon be the other way around. The people face religious problems with less and less sympathy and understanding. But art, art of some kind and some degree, they are keenly alive as to that, and quick to appraise or to argue. The churches are ever emptier; the theatres, concert halls, museums, "movies," ever fuller. A religious book--short of epoch-making--finds, at best, only a reluctant and panicky publisher; a new play, a new novel, see how many editions it passes through, how hard it is to draw at the libraries, even after the staff and all their friends and sweethearts have courteously had first chance at it! Now, it is of no use to quarrel with this turn matters have taken. And we miss the mark if we say that it is all bad. Off moments come to the best of us when we grow a bit tired of being "uplifted" and "reformed." Humanity has turned to art and, in doing so, has, on some side of its life, moved forward apace, mounted to higher modes of existence, and, whether the church knows it or not, along the steeps of Parnassus and in the home of the muses has heard some music and caught some glimpses of the not too distant fatherland of the divine and the eternal. First-rate spirits of light and leading have pointed the way to a new esthetic culture--prophetic spirits who in blackest night when deep sleep had fallen upon most men saw the rosy-fingered dawn of our new day. It was to be a day when beauty should be bidden to lead the dance at the ball of life. There were serious philosophers--there was Kant, who contemplated art as the keystone in the sublime structure which modern knowledge and moral will should be summoned to erect in life. There was Schopenhauer, to whom art was the unveiling of the riddle of the world, the most intimate revelation of the divine mystery of life. There was the hero of Baireuth, who, in his artistic creations, summed up all the spiritual and moral forces of humanity, and made them fruitful for the rebirth and fruition of our modern day.