THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION.

"The virtue of the Imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity of gaze (not by reasoning, but by its authoritative opening and revealing power), a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things. . . . It has no food, no delight, no care, no perception, except of truth; it is for ever looking under masks, and burning up mists; no fairness of form, no majesty of seeming, will satisfy it; the first condition of its existence is incapability of being deceived.”—RUSKIN.

THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION.

"Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams."-ACTS ii. 17.

THESE words from the pen of the Prophet Joel were declared by S. Peter to refer to the Christian era, which was finally inaugurated on the Day of Pentecost. The marked characteristic of this era is that those who promote and represent it have visions and dreams of an ideal state of happiness unattained but attainable. Instead of accepting the existing situation as unchangeable, instead of submitting to evil as inevitable, Christian men have visions and dreams of a Golden Age in which sin and evil and sorrow shall be no more. It has often been remarkedthat one of the most striking differences between Christianity and the classical religions of the south of Europe which it superseded, is that they placed their Golden Age in the dim and receding past, but Christianity places its Golden. Age in the bright and advancing future.

Some years ago Professor Tyndall delivered a remarkable address on the use of Imagination in Science. He showed that this great faculty of the soul was simply invaluable in a sphere of thought where superficial minds would. suppose there was no scope for its exercise. If I remember rightly, one of his illustrations was the Luminiferous Ether

which no one has ever seen, or heard, or felt, which is a pure conception of the Scientific Imagination, but which is now assumed to be a fact because its hypothetical existence explains the phenomena of colour more fully and more perfectly than they have ever been explained before. Ruskin has in noble passages descanted on the use of the Imagination in Art. In his vocabulary as in that of Professor Tyndall the word is redeemed from all low meanings. It represents not mere and groundless imaginings, but ultimate realities. Students of Wordsworth will remember that great poet's description of unimaginative Peter Bell

"A primrose on the river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And nothing more."

Whereas to the imagination of Wordsworth even the humblest flower discloses

Indeed, it may be said that artists have two divine functions. The work of painters, poets, sculptors, musicians is first of all to reveal to us the hidden meanings and beauties of all that is the Actual. As that great artist Browning has so finely said—

"Art was given for that;

God uses us to help each other so,

Lending our minds out. . . . This world's no blot for us,

...

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.”

But artists have an even nobler function. It is the mission of the greatest and best of them, secondly, to reveal the glory and blessedness of that which may be-the Attainable.

Now the faculty of the soul which apprehends the Beatific