forces for the pleasing of men
without touching them with awe, it becomes no better than a discipline
of moral enervation. Perhaps this same law would silence much of the
voluble rhetoric with which a certain school of writers are wont to
discourse of the great Miracle of Beauty which has been given to men
in the life and character of the blessed Saviour. For I must needs
think that, if they duly felt the awfulness of that Beauty, their
fluency would be somewhat repressed; and that their eloquence would be
better if they feared more and flourished less.

But the point which these remarks are chiefly meant to enforce is,
that there is no true beauty of Art but what takes its life from the
inspirations of religious awe; and that even in our highest
intellectual culture the intellect itself will needs be demoralized,
unless it be toned to order by a supreme reference to the Divine will.
There is no true school of mental health and vigour and beauty, but
what works under the presidency of the same chastening and subduing
power. Our faculties of thought and knowledge must be held
firmly together with a strong girdle of modesty, else they cannot
possibly thrive; and to have the intellect "undevoutly free," loosened
from the bands of reverence, is a sure pledge and forecast of
intellectual shallowness and deformity.[7]

[7] Since this was written, I have met with some capital
remarks, closely bordering upon the topic, in Mr. J.C. Shairp's
_Studies in Poetry and Philosophy_, a book which I cannot but
regard as one of the choicest contributions to the literature of
our time. The passage is in his essay on _The Moral Dynamic_,
near the end:

"There are things which, because they are ultimate ends in
themselves, refuse to be employed as means, and, if attempted to
be so employed, lose their essential character. Religion is one,
and the foremost of these things. Obedience, conformity of the
finite and the imperfect will of man to the infinite and perfect
will of God, this, which is the essence of religion, is an end
in itself, the highest end which we can conceive. It cannot be
sought as a means to an ulterior end without being at once
destroyed. This is an end, or rather the end in itself, which
culture and all other ends by right subserve. And here in
culture, as in pleasure, the great ethic law will be found to
hold, that the abandoning of it as an end,