arrangement
of light is absolutely symmetrical. Where there is no symmetry, the
effects of passion and violence are increased, and many very sublime
pictures derive their sublimity from the want of it, but they lose
proportionally in the diviner quality of beauty. In landscape the same
sense of symmetry is preserved, as we shall presently see, even to
artificialness, by the greatest men, and it is one of the principal
sources of deficient feeling in the landscapes of the present day, that
the symmetry of nature is sacrificed to irregular picturesqueness. Of
this, however, hereafter.

CHAPTER IX.

OF PURITY, OR THE TYPE OF DIVINE ENERGY.

Sec. 1. The influence of light as a sacred symbol.

It may at first appear strange that I have not in my enumeration of the
types of Divine attributes, included that which is certainly the most
visible and evident of all, as well as the most distinctly expressed in
Scripture; God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all. But I could
not logically class the presence of an actual substance or motion with
mere conditions and modes of being, neither could I logically separate
from any of these, that which is evidently necessary to the perception
of all. And it is also to be observed, that though the love of light is
more instinctive in the human heart than any other of the desires
connected with beauty, we can hardly separate its agreeableness in its
own nature from the sense of its necessity and value for the purposes of
life, neither the abstract painfulness of darkness from the sense of
danger and incapacity connected with it; and note also that it is not
_all_ light, but light possessing the universal qualities of beauty,
diffused or infinite rather than in points, tranquil, not startling and
variable, pure, not sullied or oppressed, which is indeed pleasant and
perfectly typical of the Divine nature.

Sec. 2. The idea of purity connected with it.

Observe, however, that there is one quality, the idea of which had been
just introduced in connection with light, which might have escaped us in
the consideration of mere matter, namely purity, and yet I think that
the original notion of this quality is altogether material, and has only
been attributed to color when such color is suggestive of the condition
of matter from which we originally received the idea. For I see not in
the abstract how one color should be considered p