religious belief

It will in no wise follow however that the civilization is on this account in decadence and here once more we are confronted with the absence of parallelism between the evolution of the arts and that of the other elements of a civilization.

At no period in history has civilization been at so high a pitch as at the present day and at no period perhaps has art been more commonplace and less personal.

The religious beliefs, the ideas and the needs which made art an essential element of civilization at the periods when it had temples and palaces for its sanctuaries having disappeared, art has become an accessory, an instrument of pleasure to which it is not possible to devote either much time or much money.

Being no longer a necessity it can scarcely escape being artificial and imitative.

At the present day there are no longer peoples who possess a national art and each people in architecture as in sculpture lives on more or less happy copies of the work of bygone epochs.

It is a trumpery borrowed garment which will soon be rent by violent revolutions.

End of footnote.

It is more especially in connection with religious beliefs that this theory may appear paradoxical.

The want of harmony between her outward circumstances and her inward longings so detained her thoughts that she was unable to pass beyond the confines of the present moment, and could not foresee that true growth must bring her, as it soon did, a great enlargement of influence and relation.

End of chapter 2 Chapter 3 of Margaret Fuller, Marchesa Ossoli, by Julia Ward Howe This LibriVox recording is in the public domain Religious beliefs Margaret's early critics First acquaintance with Mr. Emerson It was to be expected that in such a correspondence as that between Margaret and James Freeman Clark, the court of religious belief would not remain untouched.

From Margaret's own words, in letters and in her journal, we clearly gather that her mind, in this respect, passed through a long and wide experience.

Fortunate for her was, in that day, the Unitarian pulpit, with its larger charity and freer exegesis.