| Week-Day Religion |
Chapter 27 |
Page 4 |
The whole question of what is modest and pure in art is one that few Christian moralists have had the courage to meet. It is the custom to characterize as “prudish” any criticism based upon ethical grounds, or any judgment of a picture or a statue which considers its moral influence. But as Christians we are bound to look at everything from a moral point of view. A painting may rank very high as a work of art, both in conception and execution, and yet its influence be toward impurity. If this is the case, it is not fit to hang on the wall of any home. In the adornment of our homes so far as works of are concerned, Christian people cannot properly overlook this principle.
The display of undraped figures on canvas must necessarily exert a harmful influence, especially upon the minds of the young. The religion of Christ is chaste, and condemns everything in which lurks even the faintest suggestion of impurity. Whatever, then, may be the merits of pictures or statuary as works of art, true Christian refinement must fix its standard along the line of perfect purity. The same principles that we apply to books, to speech and to behavior we must apply unflinchingly to the selection of pictures for the walls of our homes.
I know that this principle is denied. Men tell us that it is only a prurient imagination that sees impurity on canvas or in marble. They call it prudery and quote the motto, “Evil to him who evil thinks,” or the Scripture aphorism, “Unto the pure all things are pure.” They taunt us, too, with ignorance of high and true art, and begin to chatter learnedly about nature. The ability to be shocked, they say, by any representation of simple nature is an evidence of an evil imagination. Such things have been said so often, and modesty has been so much laughed at, that pure and delicate souled people do not dare to seem to be shocked; they think they ought to be able to look at anything in art. The figures introduced in parlors and drawing rooms wax more and more wanton as the petrified impurity of ancient heathenism is dug up and brought to fill the niches of a pure and chaste Christianity. How will this affect the purity of our households?
Ignoring utterly the charge of prurience and over delicacy, pleading for the utmost purity in the influence of the homes in which our children are growing up, I must reassert the principle that nothing which would be indecent in actual life can be proper in art. No sophistry can make anything else out of the laws of perfect purity which religion inculcates. The least indelicacy or wantonness in any picture or statue in a home cannot but exert a subtle influence for evil over the minds and hearts of the children. We admit this principle in reference to all other things. We believe that every shadow and every beauty of the mother’s character prints its image on the child’s soul–that the songs sung over the cradle hide themselves away in the nooks and crannies of the tender life, to sing themselves out again in the long years to come. We believe the same of every other influence, and must we not of pictures and statuary as well?
A godly man said that when quite young an evil picture was shown to him on the street. He saw it only once and for a moment, but he had never been able to forget it, and it had left a trail of stain all along his years.
I plead for the most earnest consideration of this whole question of the morals of home decoration. A dew drop on a leaf in the morning mirrors the whole sky above it, whether it be blue and clear or whether it be covered with clouds. In like manner the life a child mirrors and absorbs into itself whatever overhangs it in the home – beauty and purity or blemish and stain.
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