development of the finer feelings of
the heart, the higher faculties of the soul?

Man was created 'to glorify God and enjoy him forever,' says the
elementary catechism of the sternest of all creeds. Anything, therefore,
which sets before us more preeminently the glory of God, thus placing
more vividly before us the only source of all true enjoyment, must be,
in the highest sense of the word, useful to us, as enabling us to fulfil
the very end of our creation. Things that only help us to draw material
breath, are only useful to us in a secondary sense: if they alone are
thought of, they are worse than useless; for it would be better we
should not exist at all, than that we should guiltily disappoint the
purposes of our existence. Yet men in this material age speak as if
houses and lands, food and raiment, were alone useful; as if the open
eye and loving appreciation of all that He hath made were quite
profitless; as if the meat were more than the life, the raiment than the
body. They look upon the earth as a stable, its fruit as mere fodder,
loving the corn they grind and the grapes they crush better than the
gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden, so that the woe of the
Preacher has fallen upon us: 'Though God has made everything beautiful
in his time, also He hath set the world in their heart, so that no man
can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.'

'The age culls simples.
With a broad clown's back turned broadly to the glory of the stars;
We are gods by our own reck'ning, and may well shut up our temples--
And wield on, amid the incense steam, the thunder of our cars.

'For we throw out acclamations of self-thanking, self-admiring,
With, at every mile run faster, 'Oh, the wondrous, wondrous age,'
Little thinking if we work our souls as nobly as our iron,
Or if angels will commend us at the goal of pilgrimage.'

Utility has a nobler sense than a mere ministering to our physical
wants, a mere catering to our sense of luxury. Geology is surely higher
when refleshing the dry bones and revealing to us the mysteries of a
lost creation, than when tracing veins of lead and beds of iron;
astronomy, when opening the houses of heaven for us, than when teaching
us the laws of navigation. That these things are useful to us in a lower
sense, is God's merciful condescension to the wants of our material
life;--that we may discern their eternal beauty, and so g