ich is either too heavy to be
delicately restrained, or too small and weak to transmit a vigorous
impulse; much less any mechanical aid, such as would render the
sensibility of the fingers ineffectual.[126]

148. Of course, any kind of work in glass, or in metal, on a large
scale, involves some painful endurance of heat; and working in clay,
some habitual endurance of cold; but the point beyond which the effort
must not be carried is marked by loss of power of manipulation. As long
as the eyes and fingers have complete command of the material (as a
glass blower has, for instance, in doing fine ornamental work)--the law
is not violated; but all our great engine and furnace work, in
gun-making and the like, is degrading to the intellect; and no nation
can long persist in it without losing many of its human faculties. Nay,
even the use of machinery, other than the common rope and pully, for the
lifting of weights, is degrading to architecture; the invention of
expedients for the raising of enormous stones has always been a
characteristic of partly savage or corrupted races. A block of marble
not larger than a cart with a couple of oxen could carry, and a
cross-beam, with a couple of pulleys, raise, is as large as should
generally be used in any building. The employment of large masses is
sure to lead to vulgar exhibitions of geometrical arrangement,[127] and
to draw away the attention from the sculpture. In general, rocks
naturally break into such pieces as the human beings that have to build
with them can easily lift, and no larger should be sought for.

149. In this respect, and in many other subtle ways, the law that the
work is to be with tools of men is connected with the farther condition
of its modesty, that it is to be wrought in substance provided by
Nature, and to have a faithful respect to all the essential qualities of
such substance.

And here I must ask your attention to the idea, and, more than
idea,--the fact, involved in that infinitely misused term,
"Providentia," when applied to the Divine Power. In its truest sense and
scholarly use, it is a human virtue, [Greek: Prometheia]; the personal
type of it is in Prometheus, and all the first power of [Greek: techne],
is from him, as compared to the weakness of days when men without
foresight "[Greek: ephyron eike panta]." But, so far as we use the word
"Providence" as an attribute of the Maker and Giver of all things, it
does not mean that in a shipwreck He