BLUE.
In early art, represented truth, honor, and fidelity, and even at this day we associate blue and truthfulness. Christ and the Virgin were formerly painted with blue mantles, and blue is especially recognized as the Virgin's color. We can never turn our eyes upward without seeing truth's emblematical color. How appropriate that the heavens should be blue! Of truthfulness and faithfulness it should be our constant reminder.
Primary blue enters as a compound into three other colors of the spectrum: green, indigo, and violet. As a primary color, it is much more rarely seen in nature than either red or yellow. We have few blue birds, few blue flowers, few blue fruits. As one of a compound, it is oftener found than red. The grass, the leaves, everywhere proclaim the marriage of good, as yellow anciently represented, and truth, as blue symbolized. There is a deep significance in the change that has come over mankind's view of the meaning of the first of these colors. With the loss of faith, the tearing apart of truth and goodness, has come a change of correspondence. Men have everywhere turned away from the light, though still professing to strive for truth.
Each color possesses a character of its own, which proclaims to the close observer the peculiar qualities of that to which it belongs. The horticulturist reads the peculiarities of the fruit as readily by its color as the phrenologist reads his by his 'bumps.' The red one, he will tell you, is sour, the white one sweet, the pale one flat, and the green one alkaline; that one is a good table apple, this one a superior cider apple; and if you further ask the characteristics of a good cider apple, he will tell you again it is known by its color, not only of the skin, but also of the pulp, and that it can be foretold whether cider will be weak, thin, and colorless, or possess strength, or richness, or color.
The botanist, too, regards color as indicative of quality, the yellow flower having a bitter taste and a fixed, unfading hue, the black, a poisonous, destructive property, etc., etc.
Truth, of which we have seen blue was the correspondent, is never superficial, and, although apparent truths lie upon the surface, yet a common adage locates truth at the bottom of a well. Seamen acknowledge deep indigo blue of water to be indicative of profound depth. Of the three or primitive colors, the red or heat color, which has been termed light felt, the yellow or light color, which has been called heat seen, and the blue, a color of chemical change, which is the color of growth, these correspond in an unknown degree to the love, wisdom, and truth of the Supreme One; heat to love, for love is heat; light to wisdom, for wisdom is light; and germination and growth to truth, for by truth souls grow into wisdom and love. The more we explore the arcana of nature the more we will be enabled to discover the correspondence of the natural with the spiritual world.