There should also be in the seminary an inspirational atmosphere of music, literature, and art.  Literature is a revelation of the life of the soul.  The man who reads literature and comprehends its message is receiving a fine training which shall fit him for a thorough understanding of the heart; of its practical, ethical, and spiritual problems; of its domestic joys and sorrows; of its human cares and burdens; of the appeals that will come to him for sympathy; of the temptations that beset the race; and of the hopes and trials of the world.

Literature is one of the best tools a minister can have.  He should be read in the great literary and sermonic literature, the work of Bossuet, Massillon, Chrysostom, Augustine, Fenelon, Marcus Aurelius, mediaeval homilies, Epictetus, Pascal, Guyon, Amiel, Vinet, La Brunetiere, Phelps, Jeremy Taylor, Barrows, Fuller, Whitefield, Bushnell, Edwards, Bacon, Newman, Ruskin, Carlyle, Emerson, Davies, Law, Bunyan, Luther, Spalding, Robertson, Kingsley, Maurice, Chalmers, Guthrie, Stalker, Drummond, Maclaren, Channing, Beecher, and Phillips Brooks, yes, even John Stuart Mill.  All these men, by whatever name or school they are called, are writers of essays or sermons which appeal to the most spiritual deeps of man.

He should read the novels of Richter, Thackeray, Dickens, Scott, Eliot, and Victor Hugo.  He should know intimately the great verse which involves spiritual problems, and human strife and aspiration,—­Milton, Beowulf, Caedmon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser, ballads, sagas, the Arthur-Saga, the Nibelungenlied, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Herbert, Tennyson, Browning, Dante and Christina Rossetti, Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, to say nothing of Goethe, Corneille, and the Greek, Roman, Persian, Egyptian, Hindu, and Arabian verse.

In music his heart should wake to the beauty of oratorios, symphonies, chorals, concert music, national and military music, and inspiring songs, not to speak of hymns and of anthems, the progress of Christian song!  The Creation, the Messiah, the Redemption, Bach’s Passion Music, the St. Cecilia Mass, Spohr’s Judgment, Stainer’s Resurrection, the Twelfth Mass, Mendelssohn’s Elijah,—­these are monumental works and themes.

What is a hymn?  We think of it as being some simple churchly words, set to a serious tune.  A hymn is the rhythmic aspiration of the race.  No one can look through a good hymnal—­through Hymns Ancient and Modern, for instance, or the Church Hymnary—­without feeling that therein is bound up the devotional life of the world.  The spiritual outlook is cosmic.  Our every mood of penitence, praise, and aspiration resounds in melodious and time-defying strains.

In art, the religious spirit broods over the great work of the world.  In Angelo, Francesca, Veronese, Botticelli, Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, and Correggio, the brush of the painter has set forth the adoration of the Church of God.