elfishness, force, and mere worldly
affluence. This may be a tolerably comfortable method of extinction, but
it is no way of progressive life. Music allies itself with the forces at
work on the spiritual side, and thus comes to the battle in support of
religion.

Music exists as a permanent witness to the reality of the intangible,
and to the power and pre-eminence of qualities which no money can
purchase and which Time is powerless to destroy. The so-called solid
things disintegrate, the vogue of one year spells oblivion in the next,
but the power of music to stir the pulse, to awaken the emotions and to
uplift the spirit, has remained through all the yesterdays, and will do
so--we may anticipate--through all the to-morrows. It is an ally and
co-witness with religion for immaterial and spiritual ends. Another
ally, in the guise of science, is also coming fast in support. Science
has already overstepped the bounds of the material in many quarters:
its trend is ever in the direction of the invisible, where there is
another range of values and qualities, and where no scales weigh and no
footrules measure. It is now engaged in discovering the unseen causes
which underlie the objective effects we notice in the physical world.
Presently, there can be but little doubt, we shall find the three,
Religion, Science, and Music (or rather, Art in general) ranged side by
side for the ultimate destruction of the purely material and mechanistic
theories of life: and when these are finally overthrown, with them will
also topple the doctrines, founded thereon, of self-seeking and strife.

Our own spirit-nature is our truest guide to the discernment of the
spirit universal. There is but one life and one spirit, though the
degrees of its manifestation are wide as the poles asunder: just as in
our own body there are specialised cells for high tasks and for lowly,
yet the same life pervades them all. There is a wild robin redbreast who
always comes when I dig my garden, to eat the grubs that the spade turns
up. He is not in the least afraid, and he often answers when I whistle
to him: he is a little cousin of mine. His life is in no essentials
different to my own life, except that I have the advantage of him in
being able to express so much more of the same spirit. Divinity and
spirit (are not the terms synonymous?) are in all, behind all, and in
ever-increasing degree before all. Our own answering to love and the
appeal of beauty is simpl