missioned,
My children dear!

"The hell where affrighted,
Enchanted, ye roam,--
Ye set forth to make it
A heaven for my home!"

--And it is Vision, not to mistake mankind for less or other than
Deific Essence cruelly encumbered over with oblivion; it is to
see the flame of Eternal Beauty and valiant Godhood in all men;
and not to rest or sit content without doing something to uncover
that Beauty, to rescue that Godhood.--You go into the slums
of a great city; and you do not wonder that the God-essence,
inmingling and involved in the clay which is (the lower) man,
goes there quite distraught and unrecognizable; where life is so
far from the great reflexion of the Worlds of Beauty; where the
Sun is no bright brother and confidential friend, but a breeder
up of pestilences; where the sky is shut away and there are no
flowers to bloom;--whether we like it or no, these things, the
unperverted manifestations of the formative pressure of the
Spirit, are needed to keep men sane. Beauty you must have, to
nourish the Divine within you; alas for him that thinks he may
attain to the Good or the True, and in a thin meager or Puritan
spirit, strives to shut out their divine sister from his needs
and aspirations!--But there, in our hideous modern conditions,
there is no vision, without or within; so men go mad with
fearful lusts and despairs; and it is the van of the Battle, in
one sense, between Godhood and Chaos; and reeks with the
slaughter and bloodshed and the madness of that conflict; there
too the Holy Spirit of Man is incarnate; there the Host of
Souls;--but in the shock and din and the carnage, there on the
slippery brink of yet unconquered hell,--all the divine descent
and ancient glory of the Host is forgotten:--_there is no Vision,
and the people perish._

(It may seem I go a long way round to come to him; but in
reality I am already trying to draw you a character-sketch of the
subject of this evening's lecture: to present you the permanent
part and significance of a strange incarnation of Vision that
appeared in Rome's dark and dying days: the man to whom Saint
Gregory Nazianzen, in his grand attack, applied that ringing
triplet of epithets I have taken for the title of the lecture:
"The Dragon, the Apostate, the Great Mind." Know him first in
his impersonality thus: a great white flame of Vision; a
tremendous Poet of the Gods in action;--and then, when you
come to his personality, w