Angelo and Raphael

Christianity helped to make Angelo and Raphael by furnishing them with grand themes. As no lips can be eloquent unless they are speaking in the name of a great truth, so no painter can paint unless some one brings him a great subject. Heaven and hell made the poet, Dante. Christianity made Beatrice. Paradise made John Milton. The mother of our Lord and the last judgment made Angelo. It is the great theme that makes the orator, the painter, the poet. The great theme lifts up the soul and makes it the revealer of a new world. — SWING.

Likeness of the Devil

1905

The hobby of the late Col. Blumenthal was "the collection of devils," says an English exchange. He devoted himself to collecting all sorts of representations of his satanic majesty, and he secured about 350 likenesses of the devil on canvas, and in marble, wood, bronze and ivory.


St. Patrick's Wondrous Faith

Nor was Patrick an ordinary Christian. Savages and cannibals surround him with threats and with assault. He knows not fear. Hunger and want stare him in the face. Idolatry and witchcraft oppose him. But his will is inflexible; his heart impregnable; his faith strong and mighty. Thus he labored on, making his own life a living proof of the reality of the gospel whereby he overthrew fetishism and heathenism and saved a mighty nation.

And here is the secret of it all, in his own words: "The love and fear of God more and more inflamed my heart. My faith and my spirit were enlarged, so that I prayed a hundred times a day, and nearly as much at night. Before the light I arose to my prayers, in the snow, in the frost, and in the rain, and experienced no evil at all. Nor was I affected with sloth, for the Spirit of God was warm in me."

Laid Bible Scenes in China

1921

Native Artist Had No Conception of Any Other Land Outside His Own

In north Fukien province there dwelt an artist who painted pictures on silk for the gentry of his little village. The people in this secluded hamlet nestled amid the hills had never seen automobiles or airplanes, nor did they take the long journey to Shanghai to watch the great steamers come in laden with merchandise and messages from the ports of the world. But they knew the words of Confucius and Lao-tse and they lived and died with simple dignity as their fathers had done before them.

One evening the artist, who had been working all day on a memorial portrait, strolled out into the dark, cool street to refresh his tired soul, writes Elsie F. Weil in Asia Magazine. The tiny white church of the foreign god beyond the tea shop was brilliantly lighted. The artist stood a moment in the open door. The young missionary was talking most eloquently; he was not preaching, but he seemed to be telling stories that were as fascinating as those recited in the bazaars. Almost in spite of himself the artist sank unobtrusively into an empty seat. For the first time he heard some of the beautiful old stories of the Bible, which have held the people of the West enthralled for 2,000 years.

And the artist returned to his home and made pictures of the story of Noah and the flood, and of the parables of the lost sheep and of the prodigal son and of many others that were in the book of the western missionary. But he had never heard of the Palestine. To him Noah was Chinese, and the lost sheep belonged to a farmer of his province and the prodigal son might well have been a dissolute youth of his own village.

A True Christian — Sharing Christ's Ideals

1903

Children enjoy music long before they understand the color, scale and the laws of harmony. Indeed, millions go through life enjoying the beautiful in nature and art without ever knowing anything about the laws by which colors complement each other. Also millions go through life as Christians without ever stopping to work out philosophically their ideas about the Bible or the church or the creed. And yet they are Christians, because they are loyal to Christ.

History tells of a young paint-grinder in the studio of Italy's great master who developed striking evidences of artistic skill. When an enemy of the great teacher came to the boy and urged him to found a school of his own, saying that wealth and honors and invitations to kings' palaces might be his, the youth answered in effect: "I am not ambitious to found a school or dwell in a palace, but I am ambitious to catch Raphael's spirit and reproduce in myself his ideals."

Now, that simple thought condenses in a word the essence of the Christian life. It is an ambition to rise to the level of Christ's thoughts, to feel His throb of sympathy toward the poor and weak, to abhor evil as He abhorred it, to hunger for righteousness as He hungered for it and to walk with our Father as Christ walked with His. He is a Christian who is loyal to Christ in thoughts, sympathies, friendships, purposes and ideals. — Newell Dwight Hillis.