The World's Debt to the Catholic Church

The making of the various adjuncts that were employed in religious services provided the greatest stimulus for the movement known as the arts and crafts, that is, for the making of things beautiful as well as useful, that has ever been known. Man is differentiated from the animals even more by his sense of beauty than by his reasoning power.

From the very beginning man has exhibited a cult for beauty that has characterized him very definitely as separated by an almost infinite distance from the animals whose body he shares. Even the cave man made all his utensils and also his tools beautiful as well as useful. He shaped them prettily and then engraved figures on them. He then proceeded to make his home beautiful by painting pictures on the walls of it, and in order to do so he invented oil painting; and while his pictures are primitive, they are so vivid and vigorous that a good critic has said that there is no animal painter alive today who can paint such life-like pictures of animals as the cave man made. Good anthropologists have declared that the cave man had a religious motive in this. He had come to the idea that if he could paint an animal to the life so as to demonstrate as it were his mastery of it, the spirit who ruled the world would give him power to hunt it successfully. As he buried his dead, confident that they were alive in another world than this, --for he interred with them some of their implements and utensils which had often been made at great expense of time and labor, and this in spite of seeing their bodies putrify and disappear, --the idea of a great spirit overruling things must have come very definitely to him.