of the one, or
corn or pasture land of the other, but because there is a special beauty
in all that is goodly in wood, water, plain, and slope, brought all
together by art into one shape, and grouped into one whole. Your cities
are beautiful, your palaces, your public buildings, your territorial
mansions, your churches; and their beauty leads to nothing beyond itself.
There is a physical beauty and a moral: there is a beauty of person, there
is a beauty of our moral being, which is natural virtue; and in like
manner there is a beauty, there is a perfection, of the intellect. There
is an ideal perfection in these various subject-matters, towards which
individual instances are seen to rise, and which are the standards for all
instances whatever. The Greek divinities and demigods, as the statuary has
moulded them, with their symmetry of figure, and their high forehead and
their regular features, are the perfection of physical beauty. The heroes,
of whom history tells, Alexander, or Caesar, or Scipio, or Saladin, are the
representatives of that magnanimity or self-mastery which is the greatness
of human nature. Christianity too has its heroes, and in the supernatural
order, and we call them Saints. The artist puts before him beauty of
feature and form; the poet, beauty of mind; the preacher, the beauty of
grace: then intellect too, I repeat, has its beauty, and it has those who
aim at it. To open the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to
know, and to digest, master, rule, and use its knowledge, to give it power
over its own faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical
exactness, sagacity, resource, address, eloquent expression, is an object
as intelligible (for here we are inquiring, not what the object of a
Liberal Education is worth, nor what use the Church makes of it, but what
it is in itself), I say, an object as intelligible as the cultivation of
virtue, while, at the same time, it is absolutely distinct from it.

10.

This indeed is but a temporal object, and a transitory possession; but so
are other things in themselves which we make much of and pursue. The
moralist will tell us that man, in all his functions, is but a flower
which blossoms and fades, except so far as a higher principle breathes
upon him, and makes him and what he is immortal. Body and mind are carried
on into an eternal state of being by the gifts of Divine Munificence; but
at first they do but fail in a failing world; a