nsurate to its charm
and power. As long as men's hearts surge, too, when the tide yearns
up the beach; as long as their souls become articulate when the birds
sing in the dawn, and the flowers lift themselves to the sun; so long
will men believe that only from a supreme and conscious Loveliness,
a joyous and a gracious Spirit could have come the beauty which is so
intimately related to the spirit of a man.

But not all saints and sinners are endowed with this joy and insight,
this quick sensitiveness to beauty. Some of them cannot find the
eternal and transcendent God in a loveliness which, by temperament,
they either underrate or do not really see. There are a great many
good people who cannot take beauty seriously. They become wooden and
suspicious and uncomfortable whenever they are asked to perceive or
enjoy a lovely object. Incredible though it seems, it appears to them
to be unworthy of any final allegiance, any complete surrender, any
unquestioning joy. But there are other ways in which they, too, may
come to this sense of transcendence, other aspects of experience which
also demand it. Most often it is just such folk who cannot perceive
beauty, because they are practical or scientific or condemned to mean
surroundings, who do feel to the full the grim force and terror of
the external world. Prudence, caution, hard sense are to the fore with
them! Very well; there, too, in these perceptions is an open door for
the human spirit to transcend its environment, get out of its physical
shell. The postulate of the absolute worth of beauty may be an
argument for God drawn from subjective necessity. But the postulate of
sovereign moral Being behind the tyranny and brutality of nature is
an argument of objective necessity as well; here we all need God to
explain the world.

For we deal with what certainly appear to be objective aspects of the
truth, when we regard ourselves in our relation to the might of the
physical universe. For even as men feed upon its beauty, so they have
found it necessary to discover something which should enable them to
live above and unafraid of its material and gigantic power. We have
already seen how there appears to be a cosmic hostility to human life
which sobers indeed those who are intelligent enough to perceive
it. It is only the fool or the brute or the sentimentalist who is
unterrified by nature. The man of reflection and imagination sees his
race crawling ant-like over its tiny speck