I admit specifically that Edison took the first great mechanical step
to give us the practical kinetoscope and make it possible that the
photographs, even of inanimate objects thrown upon the mirror-screen, may
become celestial actors. But the final phase of the transfiguration is
not the work of this inventor or any other. As long as the photoplays are
in the hands of men like Edison they are mere voodooism. We have nothing
but Moving Day, as heretofore described. It is only in the hands of the
prophetic photo-playwright and allied artists that the kinetoscope reels
become as mysterious and dazzling to the thinking spirit as the wheels of
Ezekiel in the first chapter of his prophecy. One can climb into the
operator's box and watch the sword-like stream of light till he is as
dazzled in flesh and spirit as the moth that burns its wings in the
lamp. But this is while a glittering vision and not a mere invention is
being thrown upon the screen.

The scientific man can explain away the vision as a matter of the
technique of double exposure, double printing, trick-turning, or stopping
down. And having reduced it to terms and shown the process, he expects us
to become secular and casual again. But of course the sun itself is a
mere trick of heat and light, a dynamo, an incandescent globe, to the man
in the laboratory. To us it must be a fire upon the altar.

Transubstantiation must begin. Our young magicians must derive strange
new pulse-beats from the veins of the earth, from the sap of the trees,
from the lightning of the sky, as well as the alchemical acids, metals,
and flames. Then they will kindle the beginning mysteries for our cause.
They will build up a priesthood that is free, yet authorized to freedom.
It will be established and disestablished according to the intrinsic
authority of the light revealed.

Now for a closer view of this vocation.

The picture of Religious Splendor has its obvious form in the
delineation of Biblical scenes, which, in the hands of the best
commercial producers, can be made as worth while as the work of men like
Tissot. Such films are by no means to be thought of lightly. This sort of
work will remain in the minds of many of the severely orthodox as the
only kind of a religious picture worthy of classification. But there are
many further fields.

Just as the wireless receiving station or the telephone switchboard
become heroes in the photoplay, so Aaron's rod that confounded the
Egyp