t
arose, for he directs the aspirant who would discover the beautiful to
"consider of greater value the beauty existing _in the soul_, than that
existing in the body." More gracefully he teaches the same doctrine when
he tells us that "there are two kinds of Venus, (beauty;) the one, the
elder, who had no mother, and was the daughter of Uranus, (heaven,) whom
we name the celestial; the other, younger, daughter of Jupiter and
Dione, whom we call the vulgar."

Now, if disinterestedness, faith, patience, piety, have a beauty
celestial and divine, then were our fathers worshippers of the
beautiful. If high-mindedness and spotless honor are beautiful things,
they had those. What work of art can compare with a lofty and heroic
life? Is it not better to _be_ a Moses than to be a Michael Angelo
making statues of Moses? Is not the _life_ of Paul a sublimer work of
art than Raphael's cartoons? Are not the patience, the faith, the
undying love of Mary by the cross, more beautiful than all the Madonna
paintings in the world. If, then, we would speak truly of our fathers,
we should say that, having their minds fixed on that celestial beauty of
which Plato speaks, they held in slight esteem that more common and
earthly.

Should we continue the parable in Plato's manner, we might say that the
earthly and visible Venus, the outward grace of art and nature, was
ordained of God as a priestess, through whom men were to gain access to
the divine, invisible One; but that men, in their blindness, ever
worship the priestess instead of the divinity.

Therefore it is that great reformers so often must break the shrines and
temples of the physical and earthly beauty, when they seek to draw men
upward to that which is high and divine.

Christ says of John the Baptist, "What went ye out for to see? A man
clothed in soft raiment? Behold they which are clothed in soft raiment
are in kings' palaces." So was it when our fathers came here. There were
enough wearing soft raiment and dwelling in kings' palaces. Life in
papal Rome and prelatic England was weighed down with blossoming luxury.
There were abundance of people to think of pictures, and statues, and
gems, and cameos, vases and marbles, and all manner of deliciousness.
The world was all drunk with the enchantments of the lower Venus, and it
was needful that these men should come, Baptist-like in the wilderness,
in raiment of camel's hair. We need such men now. Art, they tell us, is
waking i