in obedience to a
higher, more supreme aim, is the very condition of securing it.
Stretch the idea of culture, and of the perfection it aims at,
wide as you will, you cannot, while you make it your last end,
rise clear of the original self-reference that lies at its root;
this you cannot get rid of, unless you go out of culture, and
beyond it, abandoning it as an end, and sinking it into what it
really is,--a means, though perhaps the highest means, towards
full and perfect duty. _No one ever really became beautiful by
aiming at beauty. Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an
emanation from sources deeper than itself_. If culture, or
rather the ends of culture, are to be healthy and natural
growths, they must come unconsciously, as results of conformity
to the will of God, sought not for any end but itself."--"It
cannot indeed be denied that these two, culture or the love of
beauty, religion or the love of godliness, appear in
individuals, in races, in ages, as rival, often as conflicting,
forces. The votary of beauty shrinks from religion as something
stern and ungenial, the devout Puritan discards beauty as a
snare; and even those who have hearts susceptible of both find
that a practical crisis will come when a choice must be made
whether of the two they will serve. The consciousness of this
disunion has of late years been felt deeply, and by the most
gifted minds. Painful often has the conflict been, when the
natural love of beauty was leading one way, loyalty to that
which is higher than beauty called another, and no practical
escape was possible, except by the sacrifice of feelings which
in themselves were innocent and beautiful. Only in recent times
have we begun to feel strongly that both are good, that each
without the other is so far imperfect, and that some
reconciliation, if it were possible, is a thing to be desired.
Violent has been the reaction which this new consciousness has
created. In the recoil from what they call Puritanism, or
religion without culture, many have given themselves up to
culture without religion, or, at best, with a very diluted form
of religion. They have set up for worship the golden calf of
art, and danced round it to the pipe which the great Goethe
played. They have promulgated what they call the gospel of
art,--as Carlyle says, t