every attitude which varies the human body, with every
passion which sways the human soul." His supremacy is in the mighty
soaring of his intellectual conceptions. Marvellous as a creator, like
Shakspeare; profound and solemn, like Dante; representing power even in
repose, and giving to the Cyclopean forms which he has called into being
a charm of moral excellence which secures our sympathy; a firm believer
in a supreme and personal God; disciplined in worldly trials, and
glowing in lofty conceptions of justice,--he delights in portraying the
stern prophets of Israel, surrounded with an atmosphere of holiness,
yet breathing compassion on those whom they denounce; august in dignity,
yet melting with tenderness; solemn, sad, profound. Thus was his
influence pure and exalted in an art which has too often been
prostituted to please the perverted taste of a sensual age. The most
refined and expressive of all the arts,--as it sometimes is, and always
should be,--is the one which oftenest appeals to that which Christianity
teaches us to shun. You may say, "Evil to him who evil thinks,"
especially ye pure and immaculate persons who have walked uncorrupted
amid the galleries of Paris, Dresden. Florence, and Rome; but I fancy
that pictures, like books, are what we choose to make them, and that the
more exquisite the art by which vice is divested of its grossness, but
not of its subtle poisons,--like the New Heloise of Rousseau or the
Wilhelm Meister of Goethe,--the more fatally will it lead astray by the
insidious entrance of an evil spirit in the guise of an angel of light.
Art, like literature, is neither good nor evil abstractly, but may
become a savor of death unto death, as well as of life unto life. You
cannot extinguish it without destroying one of the noblest developments
of civilization; but you cannot have civilization without multiplying
the temptations of human society, and hence must be guarded from those
destructive cankers which, as in old Rome, eat out the virtues on which
the strength of man is based. The old apostles, and other great
benefactors of the world, attached more value to the truths which
elevate than to the arts which soften. It was the noble direction which
Michael Angelo gave to art which made him a great benefactor not only of
civilization, but also of art, by linking with it the eternal ideas of
majesty and dignity, as well as the truths which are taught by divine
inspiration,--another illustration