tues;
working in wood and stone it rears cathedrals; working in sound it
creates symphonies; working with ideas it fashions intellectual
systems; working in morals it constructs ethical principles; working
toward immortality, it bids all cooling streams, fruitful trees, sweet
sounds, all noble friendships, report themselves beyond the grave. For
faith itself is but the imagination allied with confidence that God is
able to realize man's highest ideals. Imagination therefore is a
prophet. It is a seer for the soul. It toils as artist and architect
and creator. It plants hard problems as seeds, rears these germs into
trees, and from them garners the ripe fruit. It wins victory before
battles are fought. Without it, civilization would be impossible. What
we call progress is but society following after and realizing the
visions, plans and patterns of the imagination.

Now our busy, bustling age is inclined to under-estimate the
imagination. Men cavil at castle-building. The pragmatist jeers at
reveries. Men believe in stores, and goods in them; in factories, and
wealth by them; men believe in houses and horses, but not in ideals.
Nevertheless, thoughts and dreams are the stuff out of which towns and
cities are builded. We may despise the silent dreamer, but in the last
analysis he appears the real architect of states! Immeasurable the
practical power of the vision faculty! The heroes of yesterday have
all been sustained--not by swords and guns, but by the sight of the
invisible!

Here is the old hero in his dungeon in Florence. While he dozed, the
night before he was to be burned, the jailer saw a rare, sweet smile
upon his face. "What is it?" the guard asked. "I hear the sounds of
falling chains, and their clangor is like sweet music in my ears."
Then, with smiling face he went to his martyrdom. And here is Michael
Angelo. Grown old and blind, he gropes his way into the gallery of the
Vatican, where with uplifted face his fingers feel their way over the
torso of Phidias. Lingering by him one day the Cardinal Farnese heard
the old sculptor say: "Great is this marble; greater still the hand
that carved it; greatest of all, the God who fashioned the sculptor. I
still learn! I still learn!" And he too went forward sustained by his
vision of perfect beauty.

And here is John Huss, looking between the iron bars of his prison
upon an army of pikes and spears, massed before his jail; but the
martyr endured his danger by the fo