A beautiful building calls out the love of beauty in the minds of the people who see it. There is an increasing number of people who are awakening to the love of beauty. Every year more people go to our art galleries, and there is keener appreciation of good music. It is a great pity that we can not have good music in this country without paying an exorbitant price for it, for in Europe it is possible for the very poor people to have the best music at a very small price.

It is this love of the beautiful in music, in art, and in every department of life which is the hope or evidence of progress among any people. Some enthusiasts have gone so far as to say that the love of beauty may constitute the religion of a future age, claiming that then there would be little likelihood of any disagreement, and there would be a greater unity of thought in the perception of beauty than could be brought to the worship of any other thing. I do not believe, however, that any religion can ever be founded upon the love of beauty alone. Beauty is only an outer manifestation that symbolizes something that is greater than itself, and the soul of man can never be content with the worship of symbols, no matter how great or how beautiful they may be. I believe this to be true, tho: that the love of beauty in the life of man shows decidedly his development, because the love of beauty is one sure indication of spiritual growth.

The love of beauty is a true radiation from the Heart of Love, but it is only one of an infinite number of rays.

It takes all of these rays to make a perfect religion. The soul will never be satisfied with anything less than perfection.

Every innate power must have outer expression. The more, however, that the mind dwells in a sense of beauty and comes in touch with the inner or higher states of life that correspond to beauty, the more beauty will mind express in the outer life. We should know that the world beautiful is our own conscious world. It expresses all that man has been or is now. It is the mirror of all that he has felt and thought. That which any individual sees or hears in this world is that which to some degree he must have helped to construct. The great outer world is man's kingdom of expression, but before there could have been a world beautiful without, there must have been one within. There must be the world beautiful of thought and thought pictures to make that inner life, that life that is the source of our world beautiful. It is in this inner world that we construct our castles.

We afterward express them outwardly, but they live first of all in the inner life. Each castle that we build, or that comes into form, must first have existed in the inner world as an ideal building. Outer things only become beautiful as the mind is able to grasp and interpret the inner beauty. The development of beauty in outer form is an ever-changing one; nothing beautiful is ever lost, but, with the expanding ideal, something is always being added to the expression of beauty.

At one stage in mental development, beauty seems to be sacrificed to size. The supreme thought of the moment is one of size. Everything must be large. Every great nation passes through this period of what we might call the hugeness of things. We are passing through it now more than has any other nation in the past, not excepting the ancient Egyptian civilization. Yet, notwithstanding, the sense of beauty is also coming into the life of the people, and we grow better able to appreciate external beauty through each succeeding generation.

I use the term "external"; yet things are not so external to us as we think. Things are the result of heart, and head, and hand, and contain something of ourselves. It is not generally known that the things we handle, and the things we do are imprest by our thought-pictures; so that a sensitive person can take up something he has never seen, and tell much of the thought that is attached to it, by holding-it in his hand or close to his forehead. We leave the impress of what we feel and what we think upon so-called inanimate matter - but there is nothing inanimate.

Energy goes into everything we do. With greater concentration, directed energy expresses itself in form. Into the sculptor's statue goes something of his own life and intelligence. Remember that with his hammer and chisel he is using energy all the time, and that energy is expressing itself in, and upon the marble. It is a living, not a dead thing. He is giving it form, and to some degree, putting his life into it. We seldom stop to think how this is done. When one winds his watch he is putting some of his own life force into that watch, and until that life force has all escaped from it, the wheels revolve and the hands continue to go round. And as truly we are putting energy into everything we do in life. When a man paints a picture, and puts into it his best thought and feeling, he puts into it some of his own spirit. That is why the religious paintings of the past inspire us. Consider, as an illustration, the works of Fra Angelico - a man so inspired by the religious spirit within him that he was able to leave as a legacy to the world paintings that now, hundreds of years after he has passed from his work, still breathe with his spirit of love, veneration, and devotion. The religious paintings of the past inspire us with the feeling and sense of religion because that is the spirit in which they were worked out.

That is why Millet, one of the very greatest of all French painters, a peasant among peasants, impresses so deeply. Because he was one with the people he painted; he understood them and put their life and his own into his pictures. By putting his own thought-feeling into his paintings they became among the most famous of the modern world. When an artist does not have enough to eat, nor fire to warm himself by, but has to go out and gather a little stubble and light a fire to warm his fingers in order to paint his pictures, one can readily understand how much of his own life he puts into them. That is what Millet had to do many a time while he was creating his most wonderful masterpieces. He put so much of his life into his work, and thought so much of it, that his physical body was not sufficiently cared for, and the time came when it could work no longer. But Millet lives in the world through his paintings more than he did when here in form.