rious days? Because beauty, as they conceived and
still conceive of it, is a mere perishable accident of matter, and
because a race which thus devoted every thought and feeling to an
inspired and fervent worship of beauty--which was so absorbed in the
contemplation of the visible, could have no longing for the invisible
which is the real life that came down among us with the only-begotten
Son of God. Nevertheless Beauty is beautiful; and when the time shall
come when the visible is married to the invisible, when eternal Truth is
clothed in perfect form, then, and not till then, will the ideal which
our fathers strove after in the great old days be realized, by the grace
of the Saviour.

"But this visible beauty, which they so passionately cherished, does us
good service too, so long as we do not allow it to dazzle us and lead
us astray from the one thing needful. To whom, if not to the heathen
Hellenes, do our great teachers owe, under God, the noble art of
coordinating their loftiest feelings, and casting them in forms which
are intelligible to the Christian and at once instruct, delight,
and edify him? It was in a heathen school that each one of your
pastors--that even I, the humblest of them--studied that rhetoric which
enables me to utter with a flowing tongue the things which the Spirit
gives me to speak to you; and if some day there are Christian schools,
in which our sons may acquire the same power, they must adopt many of
the laws devised by the heathen. If in the future we are rich enough to
raise churches to the Almighty, to the Virgin Mary and the great Saints,
in any way worthy of their sublime merits, we shall owe our skill to the
famous architects of heathen Hellas. We are indebted to the arts of the
heathen for a thousand things in daily use, beside numberless others
that lend charm to existence. Yes, my beloved, when we consider all they
did for us we cannot in justice withhold our tribute of gratitude and
admiration.

"Nor can we doubt that the best of them were acceptable to the Almighty
himself, for he granted to them to see darkly and from afar what he has
brought nigh to us, and poured into our hearts by divine revelation.
You all know the name of Plato. He, from whom Salvation was hidden,
saw remotely, by presentiment as it were, many things which to us, the
Redeemed, are clear and plain and near. He perceived the relation of
earthly beauty and heavenly truth. The great gift of Love binds and
sup