“Beauty?” replied Margaret, smiling at the unexpected question; and she raised towards him her eyes, whose lovely expression anticipated her answer.… “Well, … beauty is an undefinable thing,” she continued. “We recognize it in everything. Our souls are made to see it, to admire and love it; but I cannot, I believe, define it. It is there, and immediately we are enraptured with it. It is a ray of the glory of God; it is his power which flashes before our eyes, and our hearts are at once transported. The beautiful animal, full of life, strength, and agility, whose light and rapid steps seem scarcely to bend the delicate herbage of the field, his glossy coat permitting you to count his veins and admire the graceful and elegant proportions of his form; the plants rich with flowers and weighty with fruits; the birds with variegated plumage and tints of a thousand colors; the pure, azure skies of summer, the stars of night—such is beauty, my father; I feel it, but I cannot describe it to you otherwise.”
“Then, my dear child, what think you of the Being who has drawn all these things out of nothing, and who, by his powerful word, has given them everything, and preserves and watches over them all?”
“That he is,” replied Margaret earnestly, “the source and the veritable plenitude of all beauty; and
that if we could see him either with the eyes of the body or those of the soul, we should be perfectly happy, since he must be, and is necessarily, the sovereign perfection of all that delights in this world. And if you speak to me of eloquence, that moral beauty of soul which subdues and carries everything before it, I find in it but a new expression of that Sovereign Intelligence who has placed in our hearts the faculty of feeling and loving beauty, the strength and elevation of thought, which an Intelligence superior to our own is charged by it to communicate to us.”
“Then, my dear child, what think you of the unbeliever?”
“What do I think of him?” said Margaret, intently regarding Sir Thomas. “I will tell you: I do not think he exists.”
“How say you! that he exists not?”
“No, he does not exist, because he cannot. God has created us free, but that freedom has bounds. We cannot uncreate or make ourselves cease to be, and in the same way we cannot destroy our reason beyond a certain point; we may deny the truth with our lips, but we cannot prevent our hearts from believing it; we may arrange, assert, relate, or invent a falsehood, but we cannot convince ourselves that it is true. The sad science of the atheist compels him to remove God as far as possible from himself; to call him by a name formed of several strange syllables which do not represent him under any form to his mind; then when he has come to drive him beyond the bounds of his narrow intelligence, he denies his Creator with that tongue, with that life, and in the name of that reason which he received from him. Such a man must be a liar, although
he would not be willing to walk proudly in the public ways with the tablet of liar attached to his shoulders.”
More smiled at the strong comparison of Margaret; and as he derived an extreme pleasure from these philosophical conversations, he continued thus: