nd inspires love,
which leads to virtue.

Would that many so-called Christian legislators and Christian people
would go to this "heathen" philosopher and learn of him--learn that to
do right is always and ever the highest safety, the highest
expediency, the highest "conservatism," the highest good!

How beautifully Akenside expresses this:--

"Thus was beauty sent from heaven,
The lovely ministress of truth and good,
In this dark world: for TRUTH AND GOOD ARE ONE,
AND BEAUTY DWELLS IN THEM, AND THEY IN HER,
WITH LIKE PARTICIPATION. Wherefore, then,
O sons of earth! would ye dissolve the tie?
O wherefore, with a rash, impetuous aim,
Seek ye those flowery joys with which the hand
Of lavish fancy paints each flattering scene
Where beauty _seems_ to dwell, nor once inquire
Where is the sanction of eternal truth,
Or where the seal of undeceitful good,
To save your search from folly! wanting these,
Lo! beauty withers in your void embrace,
And with the glittering of an idiot's toy
Did fancy mock your vows."

THE PERFECT BEAUTY.

(_By Plato._)

"He who aspires to love rightly, ought from his earliest youth to seek
an intercourse with beautiful forms, and first to make a single form
the object of his love, and therein to generate intellectual
excellencies. He ought, then, to consider that beauty in whatever form
it resides is the brother of that beauty which subsists in another
form; and if he ought to pursue that which is beautiful in form, it
would be absurd to imagine that beauty is not one and the same thing
in all forms, and would therefore remit much of his ardent preference
towards one, through his perception of the multitude of claims upon
his love. In addition, he would consider the beauty which is in souls
more excellent than that which is in form. So that one endowed with an
admirable soul, even though the flower of the form were withered,
would suffice him as the object of his love and care, and the
companion with whom he might seek and produce such conclusions as tend
to the improvement of youth; so that it might be led to observe the
beauty and the conformity which there is in the observation of its
duties and the laws, and to esteem little the mere beauty of the
outward form. He would then conduct his pupil to science, so that he
might look upon the loveliness of wisdom; and that contemplating thus
the universal beauty, no longer woul