ey had for
their portion only the pain and weariness of the wilderness, leaving to
us the fruition of the promised land. Let us cherish for their sake the
old oak, beautiful in its age as the broken statue of some antique
wrestler, brown with time, yet glorious in its suggestion of past
achievement.

I think all this the more that I have recently come across the following
passage in one of our religious papers. The writer expresses a kind of
sentiment which one meets very often upon this subject, and leads one to
wonder what glamour could have fallen on the minds of any of the
descendants of the Puritans, that they should cast nettles on those
honored graves where they should be proud to cast their laurels.

"It is hard," he says, "for a lover of the beautiful--not a mere lover,
but a believer in its divinity also--to forgive the Puritans, or to
think charitably of them. It is hard for him to keep Forefathers' Day,
or to subscribe to the Plymouth Monument; hard to look fairly at what
they did, with the memory of what they destroyed rising up to choke
thankfulness; for they were as one-sided and narrow-minded a set of men
as ever lived, and saw one of Truth's faces only--the hard, stern,
practical face, without loveliness, without beauty, and only half dear
to God. The Puritan flew in the face of facts, not because he saw them
and disliked them, but because he did not see them. He saw foolishness,
lying, stealing, worldliness--the very mammon of unrighteousness rioting
in the world and bearing sway--and he ran full tilt against the monster,
hating it with a very mortal and mundane hatred, and anxious to see it
bite the dust that his own horn might be exalted. It was in truth only
another horn of the old dilemma, tossing and goring grace and beauty,
and all the loveliness of life, as if they were the enemies instead of
the sure friends of God and man."

Now, to those who say this we must ask the question with which Socrates
of old pursued the sophist: What _is_ beauty? If beauty be only
physical, if it appeal only to the senses, if it be only an enchantment
of graceful forms, sweet sounds, then indeed there might be something of
truth in this sweeping declaration that the Puritan spirit is the enemy
of beauty.

The very root and foundation of all artistic inquiry lies here. _What is
beauty?_ And to this question God forbid that we _Christians_ should
give a narrower answer than Plato gave in the old times before Chris