pirations were subordinated to this end. The beautiful
harmonious life is the true life, the well-rounded whole from which must
be banished everything narrow, vulgar, and distasteful, and in which
{108} everything fair and noble must find expression. 'Each individual,'
says Schiller, 'is at once fitted and destined for a pure ideal manhood.'
And the attainment of this ideal requires from us the most zealous
self-culture and a concentration of effort upon our own peculiar
gifts.[11]

A new form of aestheticism has lately appeared which pretends to combine
morality and culture. 'The New Ethic,'[12] as it is called, protests
against the sombreness of religious traditions and the rigidity of moral
restrictions, and assigns to art the function of emancipating man and
idealising life. But what this movement really offers under its new
catchword is simply a subtler form of epicureanism, a finer
self-indulgence. It is the expression of a desire to be free from all
restraint, to close one's eyes to the 'majesty of human suffering,'
allowing one's thoughts to dwell only upon the agreeable and gay in life.
It regards man as simply the sum-total of his natural inclinations, and
conceives duty to be nothing else than the endeavour to bring these into
equilibrium.

That the aesthetic culture of life is a legitimate element in Christian
morality can hardly be denied by any one who has pondered the meaning in
all its breadth of the natural simplicity and spiritual beauty of the
manifestation of the Son of Man. The beautiful, the good, and the true
are intimately connected, and constitute together all that is conceivably
highest in life. Christian Ethics ought to include everything that is
gracious and fair; and any theory of life that has no room for joy and
beauty, for laughter and song, for appreciation of artistic or poetic
expression, is surely deficient. But it is one thing to acknowledge
these things; it is another to make them the whole of existence. We live
in a world in which much else besides beauty and joy exists, and it is
not by shirking contact with the unlovely phases of experience, but by
resolutely accepting the ministry of sorrow they impose, {109} that we
attain to our highest selves. The narrow Puritanism of a past age may
need the corrective of the broader Humanism of to-day, but not less must
the Ethic of self-culture be reinforced by the Ethic of self-sacrifice.
We may not cultivate the beauty of life