what it was that made him so good
lately. Pointing to the picture of the Sistine Madonna the boy said,
"How can a feller do bad things when she's looking at him?"

Character is fed largely through the eye and ear. The thousand voices
in nature of bird and insect and brook, the soughing of the wind
through the trees, the scent of flower and meadow, the myriad tints in
earth and sky, in ocean and forest, mountain and hill, are just as
important for the development of a real man as the education he
receives in the schools. If you take no beauty into your life through
the eye or the ear to stimulate and develop your esthetic faculties,
your nature will be hard, juiceless, and unattractive.

Beauty is a quality of divinity, and to live much with the beautiful is
to live close to the divine. "The more we see of beauty everywhere; in
nature, in life, in man and child, in work and rest, in the outward and
the inward world, the more we see of God (good)."

There are many evidences in the New Testament that Christ was a great
lover of the beautiful especially in nature. Was it not He who said:
"Consider the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin;
yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these"?

Back of the lily and the rose, back of the landscape, back of all
beautiful things that enchant us, there must be a great lover of the
beautiful and a great beauty-principle. Every star that twinkles in
the sky, every flower, bids us look behind it for its source, points us
to the great Author of the beautiful.

The love of beauty plays a very important part in the poised,
symmetrical life. We little realize how much we are influenced by
beautiful people and things. We may see them so often that they become
common in our experience and fail to attract much of our conscious
attention, but every beautiful picture, every sunset and bit of
landscape, every beautiful face and form and flower, beauty in any
form, wherever we encounter it, ennobles, refines and elevates
character.

There is everything in keeping the soul and mind responsive to beauty.
It is a great refreshener, recuperator, life-giver, health promoter.

Our American life tends to kill the finer sentiments; to discourage the
development of charm and grace as well as beauty; it over-emphasizes
the value of material things and under-estimates that of esthetic
things, which are far more developed in countries where the dollar is
not