For art is the one religion that is always shaping its form to fit the spirit, the one religion that will never for long be fettered in dogmas.  It is a religion without a priesthood; and it is well that the new spirit should not be committed to the hands of priests.  The new spirit is in the hands of the artists; that is well.  Artists, as a rule, are the last to organise themselves into official castes, and such castes, when organised, rarely impose on the choicer spirits.  Rebellious painters are a good deal commoner than rebellious clergymen.  On compromise which is the bane of all religion—­since men cannot serve two masters—­almost all the sects of Europe live and grow fat.  Artists have been more willing to go lean.  By compromise the priests have succeeded marvellously in keeping their vessel intact.  The fine contempt for the vessel manifested by the original artists of each new movement is almost as salutary as their sublime belief in the spirit.  To us, looking at the history of art, the periods of abjection and compromise may appear unconscionably long, but by comparison with those of other religions they are surprisingly short.  Sooner or later a true artist arises, and often by his unaided strength succeeds in so reshaping the vessel that it shall contain perfectly the spirit.

Religion which is an affair of emotional conviction should have nothing to do with intellectual beliefs.  We have an emotional conviction that some things are better than others, that some states of mind are good and that others are not; we have a strong emotional conviction that a good world ought to be preferred to a bad; but there is no proving these things.  Few things of importance can be proved; important things have to be felt and expressed.  That is why people with things of importance to say tend to write poems rather than moral treatises.  I make my critics a present of that stick.  The original sin of dogmatists is that they are not content to feel and express but must needs invent an intellectual concept to stand target for their emotion.  From the nature of their emotions they infer an object the existence of which they find themselves obliged to prove by an elaborately disingenuous metaphysic.  The consequence is inevitable; religion comes to mean, not the feeling of an emotion, but adherence to a creed.  Instead of being a matter of emotional conviction it becomes a matter of intellectual propositions.  And here, very properly, the sceptic steps in and riddles the ad hoc metaphysic of the dogmatist with unanswerable objections.  No Cambridge Rationalist can presume to deny that I feel a certain emotion, but the moment I attempt to prove the existence of its object I lay myself open to a bad four hours.