Even from the point of view of Art (of which in these days perhaps too much is made), life will lose _poetry_ if it lose religion. Nothing ever stirs our sympathies like it, or like a glimpse into the inner self of our brother man, as affected by repentance, hope, and prayer. The great genius, of George Eliot revealed this to her; and, Agnostic as she was, she rarely failed to strike this resonant string of human nature, as in “Adam Bede,” “Silas Marner,” and “Janet’s Repentance.” French novelists who have no knowledge of it, and who describe the death of a man as they might do that of an ox, while they galvanize our imaginations, rarely touch the outer hem of our sympathies. Religion in its old anthropomorphic forms was the great inspirer of sculpture, painting, poetry, science, and almost the creator of architecture. Phidias, Dante, Michael Angelo, Raphael, Milton, Handel, and the builders of the Egyptian temples and mediæval cathedrals, were all filled with the religious spirit, nor can we imagine what they would have been without it. In the purer modern types of religion, while music and architecture would still remain in its direct service, we should expect painting and sculpture to be less immediately concerned with it than in old days, because unable to touch such purely spiritual ideas. But the elevation, aspiration, and reverence which have their root in religion must continue to inspire those arts likewise, or they will fall into triviality on one side (as there seems danger in England), or into obscene materialism on the other, as is already annually exemplified on the walls of the Paris _Salon_.
Again, it will not merely belittle life, it will _carnalize_ it to take Religion out of it. The lump without the leaven will be grosser and heavier than we have dreamed. Civilization, as we all know, bore under Imperial Rome, and may assume again any day, the hateful type in which luxury and cruelty, art and sensuality, go hand in hand. That it ever changed its character and has come to mean with us refinement, self-restraint, chivalry, and freedom from the coarser vices, is surely due to the fact that it has grown up _pari passu_ with Christianity. In truth it needs no argument to prove that, as the bestial tendencies in us have scarcely been kept down while we believed ourselves to be immortal souls, they will have it still more their own way when we feel assured we are only mortal bodies.