Fourth Lecture

Just conceive for a moment, how it was still in the fourteenth, in the fifteenth centuries, in Christian countries for example. It was not the sermon there, that was the main thing: the main thing was the ceremony; the main thing was, that men grew at home in a world which they saw dis-played before them in sublime and splendid imagery. All round the walls were the painted frescoes, bringing home to them the life of the spiritual world; much as though, with our earthly life, we could reach up to the highest tops of the mountains, and then, could one but climb only a little higher, the spiritual life would begin. Pictorial,—speaking to the imagination,—or in the audible harmonies of music, or else, if words were used, then mantrical, in forms of prayer in forms of formula, was the language that told of the spiritual world.