igns of sin upon the countenance and body.
How, therefore, are the signs of sin to be known and separated?

Sec. 17. Ideal form to be reached only by love.

No intellectual operation is here of any avail. There is not any
reasoning by which the evidences of depravity are to be traced in
movements of muscle or forms of feature; there is not any knowledge, nor
experience, nor diligence of comparison that can be of avail. Here, as
throughout the operation of the theoretic faculty, the perception is
altogether moral, an instinctive love and clinging to the lines of
light. Nothing but love can read the letters, nothing but sympathy catch
the sound, there is no pure passion that can be understood or painted
except by pureness of heart; the foul or blunt feeling will see itself
in everything, and set down blasphemies; it will see Beelzebub in the
casting out of devils, it will find its god of flies in every alabaster
box of precious ointment. The indignation of zeal towards God (nemesis)
it will take for anger against man, faith and veneration it will miss
of, as not comprehending, charity it will turn into lust, compassion
into pride, every virtue it will go over against, like Shimei, casting
dust. But the right Christian mind will in like manner find its own
image wherever it exists, it will seek for what it loves, and draw it
out of all dens and caves, and it will believe in its being, often when
it cannot see it, and always turn away its eyes from beholding vanity;
and so it will lie lovingly over all the faults and rough places of the
human heart, as the snow from heaven does over the hard, and black, and
broken mountain rocks, following their forms truly, and yet catching
light for them to make them fair, and that must be a steep and unkindly
crag indeed which it cannot cover.

Sec. 18. Practical principles deducible.

Now of this spirit there will always be little enough in the world, and
it cannot be given nor taught by men, and so it is of little use to
insist on it farther, only I may note some practical points respecting
the ideal treatment of human form, which may be of use in these
thoughtless days. There is not the face, I have said, which the painter
may not make ideal if he choose, but that subtile feeling which shall
find out all of good that there is in any given countenance is not,
except by concern for other things than art, to be acquired. But certain
broad indications of evil there are which the bl