THE CHURCH AND ART

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 16, 18 July 1940, Page 12

THE CHURCH AND ART

A PARAMOUNT INFLUENCE

"One of the greatest factors which affect the culture; of any people or nation is its practice of religion," said Mr. L. E. Strachan in. the course of an address on "The Culture of England" given to the Wellington branch of the Royal Society of St. George last evening. It was impossible, said the speaker, to overrate the importance of the part played by religion and the Church. This, of course, applied not only to culture in England. In all parts of the world art and culture had largely been the outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual life of the people. Where the Church was virile culture was virile. It was the Church which gave us our earliest music, it was the Church which gave us opera, it was the development of the old Church mystery and miracle plays which gave us our drama, it was the patronage of the Church which encouraged artists to paint their greatest pictures, and architects to design their loftiest creations in stone. Indeed it might not be an exaggeration to assert that to the influence of religion we owed, ultimately, the finest works of art known to European culture. The other side of the picture, of course, was that when religion declined there was an immediate reflection in the culture of the people. An excellent example of .this could be seen in the conditions which had prevailed in pagan Germany during the past decade, where art had been prostituted to deify its. patron Hitler, and where today the cave-man theme was the dominant note in Germanic culture.