of former comforts, which have been banished by el steam. But have you ever thought of the mud natural prose of our whole feeling and thinking? V source of all poetry, in the reality of our feeling or oration of the stage of life? In the style of our gar the heart that beats beneath them? What we need to feel, to think and to see naturally-and art again. Christianity has not yet said its last word of history carries and ever will carry us onwar spheres, to broader views of humanity and its gra art will kneel before Him who is "the altogether Lov the City of God has descended upon the institutions izations of men.

VII.

BEAUTY AND ART.

BY REV. JOHN M. TITZEL, D.D.

"THE beautiful," says Emerson, "rests on the foundations of the necessary." In this he is unquestionably correct. Beauty in itself is not something merely imaginary and ephemeral. On the contrary, it has its origin in God, and is as real and eternal as its source. Hence, as Keats so admirably tells us in the opening lines of his "Endymion,"

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever;

Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness."

Moreover, having its source in God, beauty characterizes all the works of God. In nature, as it comes from the Creator, its presence is everywhere manifest. It appears in the sparkling gem and in the cragged cliff; in the murmuring brook and in the placid lake; in the rosy-fingered dawn and in the goldentinted sunset; in the fleecy cloud and in the harmoniouslyblended colors of the rainbow; in the blooming flowers and in the ripening fruits; in the songs of birds and in the humming of bees; in the gambols of the lamb and in the fleetness of the deer; in the innocent smile of infancy and in the rosy cheeks. of youth; in the grace of maidenhood and in the vigor of manhood; in the starry heavens above us and in the moral law within us. Only where the poison of the serpent has utterly quenched the divine spark of life is beauty, indeed, wholly

absent.

If we now turn to Art, we find that

"Art is Nature made by Man,

To Man, the interpreter of God."

"Art," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is the perfe ture. Were the world now as it was the sixth day yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and a In brief, all things are artificial, for nature is the a The province of Art lies, accordingly, in the spl Beautiful, and its true mission is to minister to m love of the beautiful, and thus to satisfy one of the de of his higher and more spiritual nature. And as absolutely beautiful, as well as the absolutely tru absolutely good, we may accept as substantially statement of Bulwer Lytton, that "Art, in fact, is t man to express the ideas which Nature suggests t power above Nature, whether that power be within t of his own being, or in the Great First Cause, of whi like himself, is but the effect."

Beauty and Art are, indeed, very closely allied. T standing of the one involves the understanding of As we can judge correctly of the physical structu finny inhabitants of the ocean, only as we are acquai the nature of the element in which they live and have their being; so can we judge correctly of Art an ductions, only as we rightly apprehend the peculiar c istics of the Beautiful. In any thorough consideration the question, What is the Beautiful? is therefore of significance and importance. Consequently, this ques claimed the attention of the ablest thinkers from the Socrates down to the present time, and very probably much earlier period.

To the question itself various answers have been giv all of these there are to be found important elements o but none can be said to meet perfectly all the requirer the case. There is even reason to believe that a comp swer is impossible, on the ground that beauty is a sim primary quality, and that simples can only be directly and felt. But this does not preclude the importance c sidering the question. For though we may never be

give an absolutely satisfactory explanation of the nature of the beautiful, we may nevertheless show in what respects it differs from other qualities, and under what conditions it reveals its presence, and thus attain to clearer ideas confcerning it.

Beauty, there is reason to believe, has not only its source in God, but is in itself a divine quality. The relation of God to man may therefore be said to be typical of the relation of beauty to the mind of man. As the existence of God is independent of the being of man, so is the existence of beauty independent of the mind of man which apprehends it and finds pleasure in it. And as man can truly know God, only because he has been made in the image and likeness of God; so can he truly know the beautiful and rejoice in it, only because beauty has entered into the inmost constitution of his being. Beauty has consequently both an objective and a subjective existence, and these correspond the one to the other.

As a subjective experience, the beautiful is a peculiar feeling of delight awakened in us by some object in which objective beauty is present. In some respects it is akin to the agreeable, but differs from it in that it is never of a merely sensuous character, as the latter mostly is, and "depends not," to use the language of Professor Lindner, "upon the content of the individual, but upon the form of the composite." In other words, the aesthetic feeling always includes thought-feeling as well as sense-feeling. By sense-feeling I mean feeling directly occasioned by some object of sense; and by thought-feeling, feeling produced by some definite form of thought. Moreover, to create the impression of the beautiful these feelings must be so related as to merge into one another and form a complete unity. A mere aggregation of feelings, no matter how agreeable or pleasing they may be individually, or how diversified in character, can never produce in us the sensation of beauty.

Another characteristic of aesthetic feeling, is that it does not value the objects which call it forth for anything excepting what they are as complete in themselves. In their mere contemplation it finds its full satisfaction, so that even the wish of

possessing them is excluded. In this respect it esp fers from the feeling of desire, which craves things satisfaction, and, accordingly, estimates them differe ferent times, as the craving for them is greater or also from the feeling awakened by the useful, which ferred for itself alone, but from other reasons. In feeling of the direct and unconditioned valuation of apprehended, it also differs from the emotions awak by the true and the good. In the apprehension of t is the reality of things and their relations; and in t the good the nature of things and their purposes, arily claim our attention. Hence neither of these m presents itself as of unconditioned value, as in the ca beautiful, in which the perfection of that which is view which chiefly impresses us.

If, now, we turn our attention to the consideration tive beauty, we find that its primary requisite is form. this there can be nothing beautiful. A formless force it may have objective existence, and may be able g affect us, can never produce in us the aesthetic feelin form, however, need not necessarily be of a material but may be the product of the mind, especially of the i tion, and therefore of an intellectual and spiritual ch This is evident from the fact that not merely works o tecture, sculpture and painting, but also music, poet moral actions inspire in us a sense of beauty. In eith however, the form must be definitely visible or conceival in both cases it must be agreeable to the percipient Vagueness is inimical to beauty, and so also is everythin is disagreeable and repulsive to the beholder. Moreov form must always embody thought, and be in proper a ance with the thought which it is designed to express. E we have already seen, the aesthetic feeling is not of an sensuous character, but includes in it the impression of the Therefore the object that would give birth to it must refle presence of thought, and reflect it in a perfectly rational ma