Christopher Wren's intellect wrought out the plan for St. Paul's
Cathedral. But all impotent to realize themselves, these plans, lying
in the King's council chamber grew yellow with age and thick with dust.
One day a great heart stood forth before the people of London, pointing
them to an unseen God, "from whom cometh every good and perfect gift,"
and, plying men with the generosity of God, he asked gifts of gold and
silver and houses and lands, that England might erect a temple worthy
of him "whom the heaven of heavens could not contain." The mind of a
great architect had created a plan and a "blue-print," but eager hearts
inspiring earnest hands turned the plan into granite and hung in the
air a dome of marble.

Thus all the great achievements for civilization are the achievements
of heart. What we call the fine arts are only red-hot ingots of
passion cooled off into visible shape. All high music is emotion
gushing forth at those faucets named musical notes. As unseen vapors
cool into those visible forms named snowflakes, so Gothic enthusiasms
cooled off into cathedrals.

Our art critics speak of the eight great paintings of history. Each of
these masterpieces does but represent a holy passion flung forth upon a
canvas. The reformation also was not achieved by intellect nor
scholarship. Erasmus represents pure mind. Yet his intellect was cold
as winter sunshine that falls upon a snowdrift and dazzles the eyes
with brightness, yet is impotent to unlock the streams, or bore a hole
through the snowdrifts, or release the roots from the grip of ice and
frost, or cover the land with waving harvests. Powerless as winter
sunshine were Erasmus' thoughts. But what the scholar could not do,
Luther, the great heart, wrought easily.