its youth: down the ringing grooves of change "we sweep
into the younger day."

After the war we are likely to witness an art evolution which will
not be restricted to statues and pictures and insincere essays in
dry-as-dust architectural styles, but one which will permeate the
whole social fabric, and make it palpitate with the rhythm of a
younger, a more abundant life. Beauty and mystery will again make
their dwelling among men; the Voiceless will speak in music, and the
Formless will spin rhythmic patterns on the loom of space. We shall
seek and find a new language of symbols to express the joy of the
soul, freed from the thrall of an iron age of materialism, and
fronting the unimaginable splendors of the spiritual life.

[Illustration: PLATE XV. SYMBOL OF RESURRECTION]

For every aesthetic awakening is the result of a spiritual awakening
of some sort. Every great religious movement found an art expression
eloquent of it. When religion languished, such things as Versailles
and the Paris Opera House were possible, but not such things as the
Parthenon, or Notre Dame. The temples of Egypt were built for the
celebration of the rites of the religion of Egypt; so also in the
case of Greece. Roman architecture was more widely secular, but Rome's
noblest monument, the Pantheon, was a religious edifice. The Moors,
inflamed with religious ardor, swept across Europe, blazing their
trail with mosques and palaces conceived seemingly in some ecstatic
state of dream. The Renaissance, tainted though it was by worldliness,
found still its inspiration in sacred themes, and recorded
its beginning and its end in two mighty religious monuments:
Brunelleschi's and Michael Angelo's domical churches, "wrought in a
sad sincerity" by deeply religious men. Gothic art is a synonym for
mediaeval Christianity; while in the Orient art is scarcely secular at
all, but a symbolical language framed and employed for the expression
of spiritual ideas.

This law, that spirituality and not materialism distils the precious
attar of great art, is permanently true and perennially applicable,
for laws of this order do not change from age to age, however various
their manifestation. The inference is plain: until we become a
religious people great architecture is far from us. We are becoming
religious in that broad sense in which churches and creeds, forms
and ceremonies, play little part. Ours is the search of the heart
for something greater than itself w