all these there glimmers something of a
Divine Idea; as through military Banners themselves, the Divine Idea
of Duty, of heroic Daring; in some instances of Freedom, of Right.
Nay, the highest ensign that men ever met and embraced under, the
Cross itself, had no meaning save an accidental extrinsic one.

'Another matter it is, however, when your Symbol has intrinsic
meaning, and is of itself _fit_ that men should unite round it. Let
but the Godlike manifest itself to Sense; let but Eternity look, more
or less visibly, through the Time-Figure (_Zeitbild_)! Then is it fit
that men unite there; and worship together before such Symbol; and so
from day to day, and from age to age, superadd to it new divineness.

'Of this latter sort are all true works of Art: in them (if thou know
a Work of Art from a Daub of Artifice) wilt thou discern Eternity
looking through Time; the Godlike rendered visible. Here too may an
extrinsic value gradually superadd itself: thus certain _Iliads_, and
the like, have, in three-thousand years, attained quite new
significance. But nobler than all in this kind, are the Lives of
heroic god-inspired Men; for what other Work of Art is so divine? In
Death too, in the Death of the Just, as the last perfection of a Work
of Art, may we not discern symbolic meaning? In that divinely
transfigured Sleep, as of Victory, resting over the beloved face which
now knows thee no more, read (if thou canst for tears) the confluence
of Time with Eternity, and some gleam of the latter peering through.

'Highest of all Symbols are those wherein the Artist or Poet has risen
into Prophet, and all men can recognise a present God, and worship the
same: I mean religious Symbols. Various enough have been such
religious Symbols, what we call _Religions_; as men stood in this
stage of culture or the other, and could worse or better body-forth
the Godlike: some Symbols with a transient intrinsic worth; many with
only an extrinsic. If thou ask to what height man has carried it in
this manner, look on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and
his Life, and his Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has
the human Thought not yet reached: this is Christianity and
Christendom; a Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character: whose
significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made
manifest.

'But, on the whole, as time adds much to the sacredness of Symbols, so
likewise in his progress he at length