To express desires, longings, ecstasies, prophecies and passions in form and color; to put love, hope, heroism and triumph in marble; to paint dreams and memories with words; to portray the purity of dawn, the intensity and glory of noon, the tenderness of twilight, the splendor and mystery of night, with sounds; to give the invisible to sight and touch, and to enrich the common things of earth with gems and jewels of the mind--this is Art.--North American Review, March, 1888. THE DIVIDED HOUSEHOLD OF FAITH. "Let determined things to destiny hold unbewailed their way." THERE is a continual effort in the mind of man to find the harmony that he knows must exist between all known facts. It is hard for the scientist to implicitly believe anything that he suspects to be inconsistent with a known fact. He feels that every fact is a key to many mysteries--that every fact is a detective, not only, but a perpetual witness. He knows that a fact has a countless number of sides, and that all these sides will match all other facts, and he also suspects that to understand one fact perfectly--like the fact of the attraction of gravitation--would involve a knowledge of the universe. It requires not only candor, but courage, to accept a fact. When a new fact is found it is generally denied, resisted, and calumniated by the conservatives until denial becomes absurd, and then they accept it with the statement that they always supposed it was true. The old is the ignorant enemy of the new. The old has pedigree and respectability; it is filled with the spirit of caste; it is associated with great events, and with great names; it is intrenched; it has an income--it represents property. Besides, it has parasites, and the parasites always defend themselves. Long ago frightened wretches who had by tyranny or piracy amassed great fortunes, were induced in the moment of death to compromise with God and to let their money fall from their stiffening hands into the greedy palms of priests. In this way many theological seminaries were endowed, and in this way prejudices, mistakes, absurdities, known as religious truths, have been perpetuated. In this way the dead hypocrites have propagated and supported their kind. Most religions--no matter how honestly they originated--have been established by brute force. Kings and nobles have used them as a means to enslave, to degrade and rob. The priest, consciously and unconsciously, has been the betrayer of his followers. Near Chicago there is an ox that betrays his fellows. Cattle--twenty or thirty at a time--are driven to the place of slaughter. This ox leads the way--the others follow. When the place is reached, this Bishop Dupanloup turns and goes back for other victims. This is the worst side: There is a better.