Article November 19, 1910 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from C. Silvester Horne, C. L. Goodell, Cameron Mann, William Henry Meredith

[Outlook.]

In no field does the process of hardening faith into dogma bear more tragical results than in the field of religion. The tendency to formulate a vital relation, to define rigidly a free and spontaneous movement of mind, plays havoc in every art, and transforms the fresh and spontaneous feeling, the new and individual method, into an academic formula. The struggle of all vital things in the world is to keep active and free, to resist the paralysis of hard and fast method. Every man of genius in art is a disturber of the peace at the start; not a lawbreaker, but a violator of those conventional rules in which the vital force of a great, affluent nature has been turned into hard and fast precepts. The experience of the race, the deposit of its endeavors to find truth, its struggles after freedom, its anguish of toil, is of immense educational value; but when this experience ceases to be a guide and becomes a master, ceases to be a liberator and becomes a yoke, it arrests the natural growth of the creative life of men. There are few things in history so pathetic as the conversion of the liberators of the mind and soul into oppressors, so that the apostle or martyr of freedom in one age is made an unwilling tyrant in the next; so prone are men not to follow the spirit of the leader, but slavishly to copy his methods. This benumbing tendency creeps like a slow paralysis not only over society at large, but over individuals, and the man of genius must strive like other men to keep his mind open and his spirit free; otherwise he, too, becomes an imitator, not of other men, but of himself. If the vision which made his youth glorious is to give his maturity constant renewal of power, he must keep near the sources of his inspiration, and the exquisite craftsmanship which practice brings him must never be counted other than as the servant of vision.

[Rev. C. Silvester Horne, M.A., M.P., in British Congregationalist.]

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