forward! and, with the American poet, _Excelsior!_ higher, ever higher!
Many of you know that instinct familiar to the _climbers of the
Alps_,[2] as they are called, who, arrived at one summit, have no rest
so long as there remains a loftier height in view. Such is our destiny;
but the last peak is veiled in shining clouds which conceal it from our
sight. Perfection,--this is the point to which our nature aspires; but
it is the ladder of Jacob: we see the foot which rests upon the earth;
the summit hides itself from our feeble view amidst the splendors of the
infinite.

These objects of our highest desires--beauty in its supreme
manifestation, absolute holiness, infinite truth--are united in one and
the same thought--God! The attributes of the spiritual are never in us
but as borrowed attributes; they dwell naturally in Him who is their
source. God is the truth, not only because He knows all things, but
because He is the very object of our thoughts; because, when we study
the universe, we do but spell out some few of the laws which He has
imposed on things; because, to know truth is never any thing else than
to know the creation or the Creator, the world or its eternal Cause. God
it is who must be Himself the satisfaction of that craving of the
conscience which urges us towards holiness. If we had arrived at the
highest degree of virtue, what should we have done? We should have
realized the plan which He has proposed to spiritual creatures in their
freedom, at the same time that He is directing the stars in their
courses by that other word which they accomplish without having heard
it. God is the eternal source of beauty. He it is who has shed grace
upon our valleys, and majesty upon our mountains; and He, again, it is
(I quote St. Augustine) who acts within the souls of artists, those
great artists, who, urged unceasingly towards the regions of the ideal,
feel themselves drawn onwards towards a divine world.