its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring.
There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and
love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the
universe, imperishable, divine.

Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes
between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed.

And our God is a consuming fire.

If this be hard to understand, it is as the simple, absolute truth is
hard to understand. It may be centuries of ages before a man comes to
see a truth--ages of strife, of effort, of aspiration. But when once he
does see it, it is so plain that he wonders he could have lived without
seeing it. That he did not understand it sooner was simply and only
that he did not see it. To see a truth, to know what it is, to
understand it, and to love it, are all one. There is many a motion
towards it, many a misery for want of it, many a cry of the conscience
against the neglect of it, many a dim longing for it as an unknown need
before at length the eyes come awake, and the darkness of the dreamful
night yields to the light of the sun of truth. But once beheld it is
for ever. To see one divine fact is to stand face to face with
essential eternal life.

For this vision of truth God has been working for ages of ages. For
this simple condition, this apex of life, upon which a man wonders like
a child that he cannot make other men see as he sees, the whole labour
of God's science, history, poetry--from the time when the earth
gathered itself into a lonely drop of fire from the red rim of the
driving sun-wheel to the time when Alexander John Scott worshipped him