Page:Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West.djvu/65

 fashion of the age, the slant of its fancy, the turn and temper of its mind. By a trick of the pen or the brush we are cozened into old beliefs; and lest we see through the diapheneities of our new deities, we are forced to put on the smoked glasses of culture, assume a conventional pose, scientific or artistic, and worship at a distance sufficiently safe for our vanities and illusions.

But when a man of uncommon courage, insight and zeal raises a little altar of his own to the old fashioned truths and the old fashioned virtues,—when he comes, to go back to my metaphor, with fuel for our innate fire direct from the sun and soil,—he is banned from the temple of the elect, denounced as a reactionary or, what is worse, poo-poohed as a high-brow. Yes, the builder nowadays, paradoxical as it may seem, is looked upon as a destroyer. But the iconoclast of the past is incarnate in the devote worshipperworshiper [sic] of the present. This, the little red-eyed iconoclasts of the times, can not see.