tians, the brazen serpent that Moses up-lifted in the wilderness, the
ram's horn that caused the fall of Jericho, the mantle of Elijah
descending upon the shoulders of Elisha from the chariot of fire, can
take on a physical electrical power and a hundred times spiritual meaning
that they could not have in the dead stage properties of the old miracle
play or the realism of the Tissot school. The waterfall and the tossing
sea are dramatis personae in the ordinary film romance. So the Red Sea
overwhelming Pharaoh, the fires of Nebuchadnezzar's furnace sparing and
sheltering the three holy children, can become celestial actors. And
winged couriers can appear, in the pictures, with missions of import,
just as an angel descended to Joshua, saying, "As captain of the host of
the Lord am I now come."

The pure mechanic does not accept the doctrine. "Your alleged
supernatural appearance," he says, "is based on such a simple fact as
this: two pictures can be taken on one film."

But the analogy holds. Many primitive peoples are endowed with memories
that are double photographs. The world faiths, based upon centuries of
these appearances, are none the less to be revered because machine-ridden
men have temporarily lost the power of seeing their thoughts as pictures
in the air, and for the time abandoned the task of adding to tradition.

Man will not only see visions again, but machines themselves, in the
hands of prophets, will see visions. In the hands of commercial men they
are seeing alleged visions, and the term "_vision_" is a part of
moving-picture studio slang, unutterably cheapening religion and
tradition. When Confucius came, he said one of his tasks was the
rectification of names. The leaders of this age should see that this word
"_vision_" comes to mean something more than a piece of studio slang. If
it is the conviction of serious minds that the mass of men shall never
again see pictures out of Heaven except through such mediums as the
kinetoscope lens, let all the higher forces of our land courageously lay
hold upon this thing that saves us from perpetual spiritual blindness.

When the thought of primitive man, embodied in misty forms on the
landscape, reached epic proportions in the Greek, he saw the Olympians
more plainly than he beheld the Acropolis. Myron, Polykleitos, Phidias,
Scopas, Lysippus, Praxiteles, discerned the gods and demigods so clearly
they afterward cut them from the hard marble without wavering. O