share in the
advancement of beauty, inasmuch as beauty is but knowledge perfected and
incarnate--but with the pioneers it is _sic vos non vobis_; the grace is
not for them, but for those who come after. Science is like offences. It
must needs come, but woe unto that man through whom it comes; for there
cannot be much beauty where there is consciousness of knowledge, and
while knowledge is still new it must in the nature of things involve much
consciousness.

It is not knowledge, then, that is incompatible with beauty; there cannot
be too much knowledge, but it must have passed through many people who it
is to be feared must be both ugly and disagreeable, before beauty or
grace will have anything to say to it; it must be so diffused throughout
a man's whole being that he shall not be aware of it, or he will bear
himself under it constrainedly as one under the law, and not as one under
grace.

And grace is best, for where grace is, love is not distant. Grace! the
old Pagan ideal whose charm even unlovely Paul could not withstand, but,
as the legend tells us, his soul fainted within him, his heart misgave
him, and, standing alone on the seashore at dusk, he "troubled deaf
heaven with his bootless cries," his thin voice pleading for grace after
the flesh.

The waves came in one after another, the sea-gulls cried together after
their kind, the wind rustled among the dried canes upon the sandbanks,
and there came a voice from heaven saying, "Let My grace be sufficient
for thee." Whereon, failing of the thing itself, he stole the word and
strove to crush its meaning to the measure of his own limitations. But
the true grace, with her groves and high places, and troops of young men
and maidens crowned with flowers, and singing of love and youth and
wine--the true grace he drove out into the wilderness--high up, it may
be, into Piora, and into such-like places. Happy they who harboured her
in her ill report.

It is common to hear men wonder what new faith will be adopted by mankind
if disbelief in the Christian religion should become general. They seem
to expect that some new theological or quasi-theological system will
arise, which, _mutatis mutandis_, shall be Christianity over again. It
is a frequent reproach against those who maintain that the supernatural
element of Christianity is without foundation, that they bring forward no
such system of their own. They pull down but cannot build. We sometimes
hear even