[2] It may fairly be questioned whether that necessary connection between
art and religion, which is commonly taken for granted, does in truth
exist; in other words, whether great art might not flourish without any
religious content. This, however, is a speculative problem, for present
and the future rather than the past. Historically, it has always been
found that the arts in their origin are dependent on religion. Nor is the
reason far to seek. Art aims at expressing an ideal; and this ideal is
the transfiguration of human elements into something nobler, felt and
apprehended by the imagination. Such an ideal, such an all-embracing
glorification of humanity only exists for simple and unsophisticated
societies in the form of religion. Religion is the universal poetry which
all possess; and the artist, dealing with the mythology of his national
belief, feels himself in vital sympathy with the imagination of the men
for whom he works. More than the painter is required for the creation of
great painting, and more than the poet for the exhibition of immortal
verse. Painters are but the hands, and poets but the voices, whereby
peoples express their accumulated thoughts and permanent emotions. Behind
them crowd the generations of the myth-makers; and around them floats the
vital atmosphere of enthusiasms on which their own souls and the souls of
their brethren have been nourished.

[3]
All Thy strength and bloom are faded:
Who hath thus Thy state degraded?
Death upon Thy form is written;
See the wan worn limbs, the smitten
Breast upon the cruel tree!

Thus despised and desecrated,
Thus in dying desolated,