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He would have none of a formal and merely decorative beauty a beauty serving no expressional need of the heart or the imagination. In this ultimate sense he is to be regarded as a realist a realist with the romantic's vision, the romantic's preoccupation; and yet he is as alien to the frequently unleavened literalism of Richard Strauss as he is to the academic ideal.

Routine and literalism and a certain dry-throated earnestness and mental thirst, these are the very atmosphere of morbidity. If once the man could become conscious of his madness, he would cease to be man. He studies certain texts in Daniel or cryptograms in Shakespeare through monstrously magnifying spectacles, which are on his nose night and day.

They do not see that blackmail is piracy, that embezzlement is theft, that speculation is gambling that deleterious adulteration is murder. Custom-morality tends to literalism, a mere formal observance of law or custom without the true spirit of service, without any inward sweetness or power.

The spirit is forgotten, the letter is deified. Hence the reäction of the rationalistic critic against the materialism and literalism of sacred verities.

To be sure, it is not the same sort of expository preaching which made the Scottish pulpit of the nineteenth century famous. It is not the detailed exposition of each word and clause, almost of each comma, which marks the mingled insight and literalism of a Chalmers, an Alexander Maclaren, a Taylor of the Broadway Tabernacle.

To be "filled with the Spirit," to be "endued with power from on high," to be made free by the Spirit, so as to be free indeed released from the tyranny of a dead past, from bondage to law and literalism, from the power of sin and of evil habit and to be brought forth into the glorious liberty of the sons of GOD: this was a very vital and essential part of what Christianity meant in the experience of those first disciples.

That he needs this extension of experience can be seen in his growing demands for true stories, true in the more literal sense which he is coming fast to appreciate; undoubtedly most children pass through a stage of extreme literalism between early childhood and what is generally recognised as boyhood and girlhood.

The paint-imprisoned ghosts of these jolly officers, sharpshooters, regents, and shrewd-looking old women regents are not so disquieting as Rembrandt's misty evocations. They touch hands with you across the centuries, and finally you wonder why they don't step out the frame and greet you. Withal, no trace of literalism, of obvious contours or tricky effects.

Rationalistic criticism may stir people from literalism and dogmatic crystallization, in fact it has done much in this way, but it does not reach the hidden doctrines. Now Simon contended that many of the narrations of Scripture were allegorical, and opposed those who held to the dead-letter interpretation.

Not that he has made a "realistic" translation, so far we conceive him to be entirely right; but that, by dint of pushing sheer literalism beyond its proper limits, he has too often failed to be truly realistic. Let us here explain what is meant by realistic translation.