the compass of human faculties that we may see within our capacities as God sees, and hence have such faith?  Is art after all a lower creation than nature, a concession to our frail powers?  Has idealism such optimistic reach as that?  Or must we see the evil principle encamped here, confusing truth, deforming beauty, depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims, and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercised in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from the ideal order in conflict with the order of death.  I recall Newman’s picture:  “To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of men, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts, and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not toward final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, ’having no hope and without God in the world,’—­all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution.”  In the face of such a world, even when partially made intelligible in ideal art, dare we assert that fatalistic optimism which would have it that the universe is in God’s eyes a perfect world?  I can find no warrant for it in ideal art, though thence the ineradicable effort arises in us to win to that world in the conviction that it is not indifferent in the sight of heaven whether we live in the order of life or that of death, in the faith that victory in us is a triumph of that order itself which increases and prevails in us, is a bringing of Christ’s kingdom upon earth.  Art rather becomes in our mind a function of the world’s progress, and were its goal achieved would cease; for life would then itself be one with art, one with the divine order.  So much of truth there is in Ruskin’s statement that art made perfect denies progress and is its ultimate.  But perfection in life, as ideal art presents it, it is a prophecy which enlists us as soldiers militant in its fulfilment.  Its optimism is that of the issue, and may be that of the process; but it surely is not that of the state that now is in the world.