Art and Beauty

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  “But the voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. But in our day it is necessity, neediness, that prevails, and bends a degraded humanity under its iron yoke.” —J. C. Friedrich von Schiller. “Letters upon the Æsthetic Education of Man.” (1795)

The Weight of Sin

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A flippant youth once asked a preacher, "You say that people carry a weight of sin. I feel nothing. How heavy is sin? It is ten pounds? Eighty pounds?"

The preacher replied, "If you laid a four hundred pound weight on a corpse, would it feel the load?"

The youth replied, "It would feel nothing, because it is dead."

The preacher concluded, "That spirit, too, is indeed dead which feels no load of sin or is indifferent to its burden and flippant about its presence."

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