THE BEAUTIFUL
Is the Beautiful without us, or is it not rather within us? What we call sweet and bitter is our own sweetness, our own bitterness, for nothing can be sweet or bitter without us. Is it not the same with the Beautiful? The world is like a rich mine, full of precious ore, but each man has to assay the ore for himself, before he knows what is gold and what is not. What, then, is the touchstone by which we assay the Beautiful? We have a touchstone for discovering the good. Whatever is unselfish is good. But—though nothing can be beautiful, except what is in some sense or other good, not everything that is good is also beautiful. What, then, is that something which, added to the good, makes it beautiful? It is a great mystery. It is so to us as it was to Plato. We must have gazed on the Beautiful in the dreams of childhood, or, it may be, in a former life, and now we look for it everywhere, but we can never find it,—never at least in all its brightness and fulness again, never as we remember it once as the vision of a half-forgotten dream. Nor do we all remember the same ideal—some poor creatures remember none at all.... The ideal, therefore, of what is beautiful is within us, that is all we know; how it came there we shall never know. It is certainly not of this life, else we could define it; but it underlies this life, else we could not feel it. Sometimes it meets us like a smile of Nature, sometimes like a glance of God; and if anything proves that there is a great past, and a great future, a Beyond, a higher world, a hidden life, it is our faith in the Beautiful.
Chips.
THE BIBLE
The fault is ours, not theirs, if we wilfully misinterpret the language of ancient prophets, if we persist in understanding their words in their outward and material aspect only, and forget that before language had sanctioned a distinction between the concrete and the abstract, between the purely spiritual as opposed to the coarsely material, the intention of the speakers comprehended both the concrete and the abstract, both the material and the spiritual, in a manner which has become quite strange to us, though it lives on in the language of every true poet.
Science of Religion.
Canonical books give the reflected image only of the real doctrines of the founder of a new religion; an image always blurred and distorted by the medium through which it had to pass.