There was a time when men worked, too, but it was a beautiful halcyon time, when pleasure and joy throbbed in the very heart of the work itself; when a sunny serenity suffused life's profoundest seriousness. Art pervaded all life, active in all man's activities, present in every nook and corner whither his vagrant feet wandered. Indeed, art was the very life of man, revealing his strength, his freedom, his creativeness, with which he fashioned things after his own image and according to his own likeness. Every craftsman was an artist, every peasant a poet. Man put his soul into all that he said and did, all that he lived; his work was a work of art, his speech a song, his life beauty. No man lived by bread alone; everyone heard and had a word that was the True Bread. His cathedrals--domes of many-colored glass--preached it to him; his actors sang it to him; even his priests were artists. With a sort of divine humor, man thus subjected to himself all the anxiety and need of life. Then, later, man came to think that he could live by bread alone. Even the True Bread came to be mere bread--public influence; political power. And then man's poor soul hungered. And when he longed for a Living Word that was not mere bread, he was given printer's ink and the "sacred letter" of the Bible. But this--ah, this was no soul's food. So the soul lost its soul. Then, as man had no soul to work with, he had to work with his head, his arms, his feet. Man ceased to be an artist who breathes his living soul into his life, an artist who illumined all the seriousness of life with the sunshine of his living love. Would he art, he could not make it, he had to buy it. Could he not buy it, he had to do without it. Thus, life became as jejune and rational as a Protestant service, where, to be sure, there was no priest more, but also no artist, only scribe and theologian--where religion became dogmatics, faith a sum in arithmetic, Christianity a documentarily deposited judicial process between God and man. To be sure, under certain circumstances, decoration and color, even pomp and magnificence, may be found in this church, but no living connection between the outward appearance of these churches and their inner and peculiar service. Thus, too, our private dwellings have lost living union between their appointments and their inmates. What all are curious to know about these houses is whether the men who dwell in them are rich or poor, not whether they have souls, and what lives in their souls, should they have any. And because art had no soul of its own more, it became patronizing and mendicant--coquetting for the favors of the rich and powerful, sitting at their tables, perhaps even picking up the crumbs that fall beneath the tables. Art, ah, art sought bread--mere bread--and adopted the sorry principle that to get bread was the sacredest of all duties.