The pure mechanic does not accept the doctrine.  “Your alleged supernatural appearance,” he says, “is based on such a simple fact as this:  two pictures can be taken on one film.”

But the analogy holds.  Many primitive peoples are endowed with memories that are double photographs.  The world faiths, based upon centuries of these appearances, are none the less to be revered because machine-ridden men have temporarily lost the power of seeing their thoughts as pictures in the air, and for the time abandoned the task of adding to tradition.

Man will not only see visions again, but machines themselves, in the hands of prophets, will see visions.  In the hands of commercial men they are seeing alleged visions, and the term “vision” is a part of moving-picture studio slang, unutterably cheapening religion and tradition.  When Confucius came, he said one of his tasks was the rectification of names.  The leaders of this age should see that this word “vision” comes to mean something more than a piece of studio slang.  If it is the conviction of serious minds that the mass of men shall never again see pictures out of Heaven except through such mediums as the kinetoscope lens, let all the higher forces of our land courageously lay hold upon this thing that saves us from perpetual spiritual blindness.

When the thought of primitive man, embodied in misty forms on the landscape, reached epic proportions in the Greek, he saw the Olympians more plainly than he beheld the Acropolis.  Myron, Polykleitos, Phidias, Scopas, Lysippus, Praxiteles, discerned the gods and demigods so clearly they afterward cut them from the hard marble without wavering.  Our guardian angels of to-day must be as clearly seen and nobly hewn.

A double mental vision is as fundamental in human nature as the double necessity for air and light.  It is as obvious as that a thing can be both written and spoken.  We have maintained that the kinetoscope in the hands of artists is a higher form of picture writing.  In the hands of prophet-wizards it will be a higher form of vision-seeing.

I have said that the commercial men are seeing alleged visions.  Take, for instance, the large Italian film that attempts to popularize Dante.  Though it has a scattering of noble passages, and in some brief episodes it is an enhancement of Gustave Dore, taking it as a whole, it is a false thing.  It is full of apparitions worked out with mechanical skill, yet Dante’s soul is not back of the fires and swords of light.  It gives to the uninitiated an outline of the stage paraphernalia of the Inferno.  It has an encyclopaedic value.  If Dante himself had been the high director in the plenitude of his resources, it might still have had that hollowness.  A list of words making a poem and a set of apparently equivalent pictures forming a photoplay may have an entirely different outcome.  It may be like trying to see a perfume or listen to a taste.  Religion that comes in wholly through the eye has a new world in the films, whose relation to the old is only discovered by experiment and intuition, patience and devotion.