the transfiguration is not the work of this inventor or any other.  As long as the photoplays are in the hands of men like Edison they are mere voodooism.  We have nothing but Moving Day, as heretofore described.  It is only in the hands of the prophetic photo-playwright and allied artists that the kinetoscope reels become as mysterious and dazzling to the thinking spirit as the wheels of Ezekiel in the first chapter of his prophecy.  One can climb into the operator’s box and watch the sword-like stream of light till he is as dazzled in flesh and spirit as the moth that burns its wings in the lamp.  But this is while a glittering vision and not a mere invention is being thrown upon the screen.

The scientific man can explain away the vision as a matter of the technique of double exposure, double printing, trick-turning, or stopping down.  And having reduced it to terms and shown the process, he expects us to become secular and casual again.  But of course the sun itself is a mere trick of heat and light, a dynamo, an incandescent globe, to the man in the laboratory.  To us it must be a fire upon the altar.

Transubstantiation must begin.  Our young magicians must derive strange new pulse-beats from the veins of the earth, from the sap of the trees, from the lightning of the sky, as well as the alchemical acids, metals, and flames.  Then they will kindle the beginning mysteries for our cause.  They will build up a priesthood that is free, yet authorized to freedom.  It will be established and disestablished according to the intrinsic authority of the light revealed.

Now for a closer view of this vocation.

The picture of Religious Splendor has its obvious form in the delineation of Biblical scenes, which, in the hands of the best commercial producers, can be made as worth while as the work of men like Tissot.  Such films are by no means to be thought of lightly.  This sort of work will remain in the minds of many of the severely orthodox as the only kind of a religious picture worthy of classification.  But there are many further fields.

Just as the wireless receiving station or the telephone switchboard become heroes in the photoplay, so Aaron’s rod that confounded the Egyptians, the brazen serpent that Moses up-lifted in the wilderness, the ram’s horn that caused the fall of Jericho, the mantle of Elijah descending upon the shoulders of Elisha from the chariot of fire, can take on a physical electrical power and a hundred times spiritual meaning that they could not have in the dead stage properties of the old miracle play or the realism of the Tissot school.  The waterfall and the tossing sea are dramatis personae in the ordinary film romance.  So the Red Sea overwhelming Pharaoh, the fires of Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace sparing and sheltering the three holy children, can become celestial actors.  And winged couriers can appear, in the pictures, with missions of import, just as an angel descended to Joshua, saying, “As captain of the host of the Lord am I now come.”