versal; but his most important Sermon on Nature ought to be faithfully studied, and cannot be transcribed here. It has additional weight at the present time, because it appeals to the sense of sight, which is the nearest appeal by Spirit to reason through sense. Beauty is as much a phenomenon as oxygen or hydrogen as good a fact as torpedoes and vivisection, blood-poisoning and riverpoisoning, typhoid or grenade shell, or any other product of modern civilization, which may possibly console us for her absence. Faith may be pronounced immoral, hope smitten on the mouth, love analyzed into what is gracefully called natural function; all three are blasphemed and denied by pretty nearly the whole literary generation; but it does not suit culture to deny beauty, or materialism to quarrel with culture. And irrefragable beauty does certainly, to those who concede the possible exist ence of Spirit, or to any person whenever he does so, seem like a personal appeal for His own and due glory, from the Father of spirits to man. We cannot see why Goethe's view of nature as a manifestation of God should be accused of Pantheism. He does not say the Earth-Spirit is divine; he says his office is to weave for God the vesture man sees him by. And Carlyle adds, in words yet weightier, that nature, which is the Time-Vesture of God, and reveals him to the wise, hides him from the foolish.* The spirit of art then to Theists and upward in the scale of creed, is the spirit of aspiring or adoring delight in the sight of God's works. And my reason for repeating this definition for the fiftieth time is, that it appears to be altogether forgotten by modern artists. and critics; or it has been repeated coventionally till it is worth nothing on the exchange of genuine convictions And there appears just now the more reason for reproducing this sufficiently great and true idea, because its withdrawal or partial effacement seems to be grievously felt in English art. In French work, as we have it, such an absence is not felt, because the spirit of self-expression, and skilful and witty display of human emotion, good, bad, and indifferent, is and always has been the be-all

* Sartor Resartus, ch. viii., Bk. III.

and the end-all of French art. It is highly trained in learning and technics; it is vivid, powerful, logically in accordance with its own rules; it is often noble and aspiring; but it is without God in this world, and strongly preferred by a majority on this side the Channel for that reason.

But we are not here concerned with French art. The object of the present writer is to go back once more to the Greek view of nature and of beauty, sanctos ausus recludere fontes. Let us see whether that was religious or irreligious, godly or godless. If it shall be proved to be atheistic like that of the modern Renaissance, so much the worse for both Art and Religion, meaning by the latter word in this place man's knowledge of God through his visible works. But if the Greek view of beauty be found to have been Pantheistic only, and that in the Theistic sense*-so that the Attic citizen really thought the olives of his Academe had something of an unknown God in them, or manifested God to him

then it is no use trying to appeal to his life as godless, or to his art as irreligious. He did not know God, but he certainly sought after him. He was, no doubt, rather superstitious, as St. Paul told him; and as had been remarked of him in another tone by Thucydides 400 years before. His Deisidamonia sometimes did him more harm than good; but he did, after his fashion, believe in God, and feel after him, as manifested by natural things. He thought Nymphs lived in the streams, and Dryads in the oaks, and that Athene was somewhere about Athens, chiefly in the Parthenon.

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But he thought Athene was his goddess" in good earnest, and that she might be one manifestation of the one Oɛiov; and, moreover, that the Nymphs and Dryads would know, if he polluted the land by murder, or other evil deeds, beneath their oaks, or by their streams. He believed in a Theion or Divinity, and in a kind of watchful police of spirits and local heroes dead

* Pantheism, when explained to mean the absorption of the Infinite in the Finite, of God in Nature, is Atheism. When explained to mean

the absorption of Nature in God, of the Finite in the Infinite, it amounts to an exaggeration of Theism. Fleming's “Vocabulary of Philosophy."

and gone before, who would not have their land polluted by his sin. And for a time, and in a measure, he ruled himself accordingly. In the Periclean, or Pheidian age, the Athenian soldier, seaman, and legislator was about the last person in the world to look to as an example of Nature's happy Agnosticism. As our Gothic ancestors built churches for modern infidels to criticise, or contemplate as denuded of their associations and their reverence, so Pheidias and Ictimus, who certainly believed very much more in God than the modern Renaissance, bequeathed it to the Parthenon, to make the most of, not as an argument for Greek Theism, but for modern Atheism. It has again and again been pointed out how sympathetically St. Paul deals with his Areopagitic audience. He addresses them almost as one of themselves, only he has this special message which, he knows, they all so desire and long to hear "Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you. We do not mean to pursue this again.* All we have to say is that appeal by side-wind to Greek art as unconnected with Religion, and the service of God, is utterly out of the question. Nature worship is still worship, however untaught and misdirected.

It has been said, with truth, that the stronger side of the Greek worship of beauty is that athe Greek considered human beauty symbolic of Divine. That is to say, he was in possession of one great branch of Dr. Mozley's argument, but arrived at imperfect conclusions, being hampered partly by imperfect analysis, and partly by his own more imperfect morals. He argued thus Physical beauty is everywhere; but is represented by human beauty, since man is greater and better than other animals, and is the proper standard. Human beauty is, first analagous to, and secondly symbolic of, an ideal, typical, or Divine beauty. Thirdly, the physical side of human beauty is, in many cases, and ought to be in all, co-ordinate with ideal, or moral, or mental beauty. All these adjectives were, if not confounded, at least not per

fectly defined or distinguished, in the Greek mind, up to the latter days of Socrates at least. But the Greek mind was shrewd as well as subtle, and practical as well as creative. What stands so much in the way of our endeavors to understand it is, in fact, that beauty was a real and practical thing in its sight. The modern Englishman can get up a knowledge of beauty as an article of commerce, honorable or the contrary; to the Athenian it was an element of daily life, and a basis of his many thoughts about himself. It is one of the great responsibilities of having the Faith in Christ set before one, that it must be taken or left, and nothing else will answer the same questions about one's self. Righ tor wrong, it is a hopeful hypothesis of mankind, and of every man; and if you leave it, and try to make another for yourself, you incur a responsibility which Phidias, or Pericles, or Strepsiades, or Dicaopolis of Acharnæ, or any other Zeugite or Thete -none of them incurred. These had, in fact, nothing better than beauty (as they understood the word and the thing) wherein to find a sign of God, a token of immortality, and right and final end of evil. They never heard St. Paul; they were not, like us, heirs of nineteen ages of men all dead in faith; they were the fathers, of whom the Apostle did not despair, who felt after God. But having to feel after him blindly, and to construct a theory of him for their own use, they took the great natural beauty in which they lived as a guide to him and sign of him; and looked, as in a glass and darkly, for some kind of beauty of Holiness, which should include all others; which should not only possess, but be the ideal fountain of strength, and beauty, and wisdom and right, and the knowledge of all things whatever, as they are and no otherwise. This Idea, or universal antitype, had for its type every fair or good sight a Greek saw all day. The Agalma of Athene, the long friezes of gods and heroes, the blue water and whistling breeze of the Ægean, the horse, and the olive, the cypress, and nightingale, and violet-bed by the well-these were all part of the witness of beauty! And he did not hear their witness as a rhetorical dilettante; he thought if all these concretes

were fair, and noble youths and maidens fairer yet, then the man perfected in self-balanced righteousness and knowledge, the Sophron, was fairest of all, and the best sign of God to all men. He ought to have felt as a corollary, as Minucius Felix, the keen Roman lawyercovert said in his day, that no idol in the likeness of man should be set up for God, since man himself was made in God's own image.

Now after many days we are recalled, by an Oxford Hellenist (as we venture to call that person with considerable knowledge of Greek), to the thought that natural beauty is a sign of God; that the mechanism of creation is, and was, designed by a designer, not only for a man to live by, but to dwell on with wonder, admiration, hope, sense of support in belief. As it was a central witness in the Greek Theology, so it is an important one in in our own. The older and simpler Greek of Marathon would be involved in a kind of Pantheistic demonology of local presences. He would say, I live among these haunting good neighbors of nymphs and heroes; they are children of the gods, and make the beauty of the scenes they live in, therefore this delight of the eye I find in that scenery is Divine, and shows me there is a God. Or later, he might let Plato say the same thing for him in abstract terms, that the ideal of beauty is the ideal of the God and Father of us all. It may be submitted that many moderns of the Renaissance had better do the same, and that the Renaissance determination to do nothing of the kind is a bar between it and any true Hellenism. Dr. Mozley is simply as Hellenic in his view of Greek beauty as Sir F. Leighton, or Professors Poynter or Richmond. Nature was to Pheidias, as to Goethe and these moderns, the TimeVesture, a raiment whereby we see God, or the mirror wherein he shows us of himself; and it is time that Theists of these latter days should see how much they have in common with the fathers of our art, our soul-wisdom, and handcunning. And it is really a thing to be most thankful for, that a trained theologian and metaphysician, wholly devoted to the teaching of the Christian faith, should reopen this connection between the phenomena of natural beauty and

spiritual thought, between the body and its earthly perfection (with other and earthly things in theirs), and the final ideal, or perfection, or Holiness, or Lord and Rest of the soul.

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That such a true renascence" of principle should have issued from Oxford through the utterances of her Regius Professor of Divinity and her first Slade Professor of Art, is auspicious enough in itself; and it points to some reaction from that contempt or despondency about beauty, as good at all, or useful at all, or practical at all, or anything at all, or in any sense worth living for, which has long enough prevailed in that seat of learning, and in the country which it now rather too faithfully and promptly reflects and represents. That this principle has been forgotten is evident, and it has been proved also that that is not in fact our fault; for that beauty soon ceased to be a guide to Greek thought because of the complete failure of Greek morals. We have enough to blame ourselves for; but we did not poison Pheidias, or make Praxiteles compose Aphrodites from contemporary Laises and Thaises; or introduce rhypopaphy or pornography. Our very vices are mere copies, as far as they have anything to do with art. Our fault is, first, in undue, though not unnatural, suspicion of art; which throws many either into ascetic rejection, or into highly undesirable insurrection against decency. Secondly, in our determination not only to follow the Greek discipline in art, but to neglect Our Own Gothic landscape-motives because the Greek made man the standard of drawing. Thirdly, we wrong in allowing science to browbeat us ridiculously out of art and religion, both at once, and in the same way.

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When we speak of the decline of artistic spirit or inspiration, it must be remembered that we only echo the complaints of skilled teachers and thoughtful scholars, as a pretty wide experience and observation entitles us to do. It does seem that the general incredulity of the age has a great deal to do with this faintheartedness in art. It is not want of skill; we have men as skilful as lived in the Florence of Michael Angelo, if not as in the Venice of Titian. It is that poverty of spirit, which has the