of the nations, and he has given to perishable matter a perfection of
form which has elevated and vivified it to immortality. Nothing more
beautiful has ever been imagined or executed, before or since, or by any
other people, than was produced by Greece in its prime. But perhaps you
will ask, why did not the Redeemer come down among our fathers in those
glorious days? Because beauty, as they conceived and still conceive of
it, is a mere perishable accident of matter, and because a race which
thus devoted every thought and feeling to an inspired and fervent worship
of beauty--which was so absorbed in the contemplation of the visible,
could have no longing for the invisible which is the real life that came
down among us with the only-begotten Son of God. Nevertheless Beauty is
beautiful; and when the time shall come when the visible is married to
the invisible, when eternal Truth is clothed in perfect form, then, and
not till then, will the ideal which our fathers strove after in the great
old days be realized, by the grace of the Saviour.

"But this visible beauty, which they so passionately cherished, does us
good service too, so long as we do not allow it to dazzle us and lead us
astray from the one thing needful. To whom, if not to the heathen
Hellenes, do our great teachers owe, under God, the noble art of
coordinating their loftiest feelings, and casting them in forms which are
intelligible to the Christian and at once instruct, delight, and edify
him? It was in a heathen school that each one of your pastors--that even
I, the humblest of them--studied that rhetoric which enables me to utter
with a flowing tongue the things which the Spirit gives me to speak to
you; and if some day there are Christian schools, in which our sons may
acquire the same power, they must adopt many of the laws devised by the
heathen. If in the future we are rich enough to raise churches to the
Almighty, to the Virgin Mary and the great Saints, in any way worthy of
their sublime merits, we shall owe our skill to the famous architects of