that
myriads of the inhabitants of the world for four thousand years have
been left to wander and perish, many of them everlastingly, in order
that, in fulness of time, divine truth might be preached sufficiently to
ourselves: with this farther ineffable mischief for direct result, that
multitudes of kindly-disposed, gentle, and submissive persons, who might
else by their true patience have alloyed the hardness of the common
crowd, and by their activity for good balanced its misdoing, are
withdrawn from all such true services of man, that they may pass the
best part of their lives in what they are told is the service of God;
_namely, desiring what_ _they cannot obtain, lamenting what they cannot
avoid, and reflecting on what they cannot understand_.[5]

[Footnote 5: This concentrated definition of monastic life is of course
to be understood only of its more enthusiastic forms.]

40. This, I repeat, is the deadliest, but for you, under existing
circumstances, it is becoming daily, almost hourly, the least probable
form of Pride. That which you have chiefly to guard against consists in
the overvaluing of minute though correct discovery; the groundless
denial of all that seems to you to have been groundlessly affirmed; and
the interesting yourselves too curiously in the progress of some
scientific minds, which in their judgment of the universe can be
compared to nothing so accurately as to the woodworms in the panel of a
picture by some great painter, if we may conceive them as tasting with
discrimination of the wood, and with repugnance of the colour, and
declaring that even this unlooked-for and undesirable combination is a
normal result of the action of molecular Forces.

41. Now, I must very earnestly warn you, in the beginning of my work
with you here, against allowing either of these forms of egotism to
interfere with your judgment or practice of art. On the one hand, you
must not allow the expression of your own favourite religious feelings
by any particular form of art to modify your judgment of its absolute
merit; nor allow the art itself to become an illegitimate means of
deepening and confirming your convictions, by realising to your eyes
what you dimly conceive with the brain; as if the greater clearness of
the image were a stronger proof of its truth. On the other hand, you
must not allow your scientific habit of trusting nothing but what you
have ascertained, to prevent you from appreciating, or at leas