But the minds of scholars and students, in different parts of Europe, began to reach other conclusions concerning the nature and order of things than such as had been ecclesiastically settled for them. Copernicus saw that the heavenly bodies did not move in accordance with the teachings of the Church. And when the Venetian scholars looked through the telescope of Galileo at Padua, and saw Jupiter and his satellites, a central sun and revolving planets, the authority of the Church on the subject of astronomy was gone. In this way the Church has been forced to give up one position after another. The people, seeing she had no foundation for the opinions she held concerning nature, began to question the value of her opinions concerning God, and heaven and hell, and right and wrong.
Now the Church must regain her note of authority. She must do this by seeing what the laws are which grow out of the facts of condition. The laws of the family are to be deduced from the truths of relation which constitute the family. These will be seen to coincide with the old laws uttered from Sinai. The laws of society are to be deduced from the truths of relation which constitute society. These, it will be seen, are summed up as was said of old in the formula, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” When men get through framing laws for the regulation of human conduct, from a study of the facts of human nature, they will find to their amazement that they have reinstated the Ten Commandments, and that Sinai is not a burnt out volcano. They will find that the Ten Commandments are still the foundations of social health, and harmony, and progress. God wrote them for Moses on tables of stone because he had already written them in the nature of man. The laws of gravity can no more be read out of the world of space than the Eternal Decalogue can be read out of the world of human life. So the man of law should speak with the same authority as the man of science, without apology and without misgivings.
BEAUTY.
“If the endeavor to analyze the world is a trifle, it is because the world is such. The sum of things can have no second intention, nor can it be characterized by any trait that is not included in itself. Some things are sweet, but what is our sense which perceives them; some things are good, but what is our conscience which judges them; some things are true, but what is our intellect which argues them; some things are deep, but what is our reason which fathoms them? Everyone who thinks deeply, must have reflected that, if the purposes and results of man’s practice are vanity, so also must be those of his speculation. Goethe said, that there was no refuge from virtues that were not our own, but in loving them; and Ecclesiastes, that there was none from the vanity of life, but in fearing and obeying God. So, also, from the vanity of speculation there is no refuge but in acquiescing in its relative nature, and accepting truth for what it is.”
CHAPTER V.
THE PROVISION FOR THE ÆSTHETIC NATURE OF MAN.
The glory of the mind is the possession of two eyes, the eye of sense and the eye of reason. Through the one, it looks out upon the world of matter and fact. Through the other, it beholds the world of idea and relation. The world of matter and fact, seen through the eye of sense, is lifted and transfigured and multiplied a thousandfold when contemplated through the eye of reason. When the literal world is transferred to the ideal world, it takes on hues and dimensions in accordance with the universal and illimitable nature of man. The world which the sense sees, and the world which the reason sees, are both real, and through the mind commerce is kept up between them. Along this mental highway facts make a pilgrimage to the holy land of reason; there they are changed into ideas. Stars are turned into astronomy, atoms into chemistry, rocks into geology, plants into botany, colors into beauty and sounds into harmony.
Over the same royal road, ideas pass to the world of sense. There they are changed again into facts. Ideas of beauty, distilled in the alembic of the imagination from the seven prismatic colors, are turned into painting, and Raphael’s “Transfiguration” blesses the world. Ideas of harmony, formed by the power of the imagination from the notes of the musical scale, are turned into song, and Handel’s “Messiah” agitates the thoughts and feelings of men with the melody of the skies. Ideas of form, deduced from the contemplation of the shapes of things, are turned into sculpture, and Michael Angelo’s “Moses” augments the world’s fund of conviction and courage. By changing facts into ideas, the mind gives us science. By changing ideas back to facts, it gives us art. Without science, life would be without bread; without art, it would be without ideals.