-

* * *

"Man is, in the strictest sense of the word, a progressive being, and
with many periods of inaction and retrogression, has still held, upon
the whole, a steady course towards the great end of his existence, the
re-union and re-harmonizing of the three elements of his being,
dislocated by the Fall, in the service of his God. Each of these three
elements, Sense, Intellect, and Spirit, has had its distinct development
at three distant intervals, and in the personality of the three great
branches of the human family. The race of Ham, giants in prowess if not
in stature, cleared the earth of primeval forests and monsters, built
cities, established vast empires, invented the mechanical arts, and gave
the fullest expansion to the animal energies. After them, the Greeks,
the elder line of Japhet, developed the intellectual faculties,
Imagination and Reason, more especially the former, always the earlier
to bud and blossom; poetry and fiction, history, philosophy, and
science, alike look back to Greece as their birthplace; on the one hand
they put a soul into Sense, peopling the world with their gay
mythology--on the other they bequeathed to us, in Plato and Aristotle,
the mighty patriarchs of human wisdom, the Darius and the Alexander of
the two grand armies of thinking men whose antagonism has ever since
divided the battlefield of the human intellect:--While, lastly, the race
of Shem, the Jews, and the nations of Christendom, their _locum
tenentes_ as the Spiritual Israel, have, by God's blessing, been
elevated in Spirit to as near and intimate communion with Deity as is
possible in this stage of being. Now the peculiar interest and dignity
of Art consists in her exact correspondence in her three departments
with these three periods of development, and in the illustration she
thus affords--more closely and markedly even than literature--to the
all-important truth that men stand or fall according as they look up to
the Ideal or not. For example, the Architecture of Egypt, her pyramids
and temples, cumbrous and inelegant, but imposing from their vastness
and their gloom, express the ideal of Sense or Matter--elevated and
purified indeed, and nearly approaching the Intellectual, but Material
still; we think of them as of natural scenery, in association with caves
or mountains, or vast periods of time; their voice is as the voice of
the sea, or as that of 'many peoples,' shouting in unison:--But the