Is not the sorrow of the heathen a vain thing?
What is it after all that they bewail? To understand that, try to picture
to yourselves what it is that they think they are losing. Verily it is
not a small matter, and it includes many things for which we and all
mankind owe them a debt of gratitude. We call ourselves Christians and
are proud of the name; but we also call ourselves Hellenes, and are proud
of that name too. It was under the protection of the old gods, whose fall
is about to be consummated, that the Greeks achieved marvellous deeds,
nurturing the gifts of the intellect which the Almighty bestowed on their
race, like faithful gardeners, and making them bring forth marvellous
fruit. In the realm of thought the Greek is sovereign of the nations, and
he has given to perishable matter a perfection of form which has elevated
and vivified it to immortality. Nothing more beautiful has ever been
imagined or executed, before or since, or by any other people, than was
produced by Greece in its prime. But perhaps you will ask, why did not
the Redeemer come down among our fathers in those glorious 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 t