oman, in cave or mountain peak, in tree or
flower, even in bird or butterfly.

But Himself?--Who can see Him? Except the humble and the contrite heart,
to whom He reveals Himself as a Spirit to be worshipped in spirit and in
truth, and not in bread, nor wood, nor stone, nor gold, nor
quintessential diamond.

So we shall obey the sound instinct of our Christian forefathers, when
they shaped their churches into forest aisles, and decked them with the
boughs of the woodland, and the flowers of the field: but we shall obey
too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which made them at last cast out of
their own temples, as misplaced and unnatural things, the idols which
they had inherited from Rome.

So we shall obey the sound instinct of our heathen forefathers, when they
worshipped the unknown God beneath the oaks of the primeval forest: but
we shall obey, too, that sounder instinct of theirs, which taught them
this, at least, concerning God--That it was beneath His dignity to coop
Him within walls; and that the grandest forms of nature, as well as the
deepest consciousnesses of their own souls, revealed to them a mysterious
Being, who was to be beheld by faith alone.

GEORGE BUCHANAN, SCHOLAR

The scholar, in the sixteenth century, was a far more important personage
than now. The supply of learned men was very small, the demand for them
very great. During the whole of the fifteenth, and a great part of the
sixteenth century, the human mind turned more and more from the
scholastic philosophy of the Middle Ages to that of the Romans and the
Greeks; and found more and more in old Pagan Art an element which
Monastic Art had not, and which was yet necessary for the full
satisfaction of their craving after the Beautiful. At such a crisis of
thought and taste, it was natural that the classical scholar, the man who
knew old Rome, and still more old Greece, should usurp the place of the
monk, as teacher of mankind; and that scholars should form, for a while,
a new and powerful aristocracy, limited and privileged, and all the more
redoubtable, because its power lay in intellect, and had been won by
intellect alone.

Those who, whether poor or rich, did not fear the monk and priest, at
least feared the "scholar," who held, so the vulgar believed, the keys of
that magic lore by which the old necromancers had built cities like Rome,
and worked marvels of mechanical and chemical skill, which the degenerate
modern could ne