n grace in man and
woman--the grace of our dear Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. True, that
grace is but little realised in the best of families--little consciously
realised in the noblest life. But, oh! surely a human family--brothers
and sisters in a home on earth--are a sure and certain pledge that this
grace does exist--that God is--for here we have an exquisite though
imperfect copy of the family life of God. Thank God when you see a good
or a beautiful man or woman, a pure and a simple family--thank God,
because it is a revelation, a manifestation, an unveiling, a copy, a
likeness of Himself. For though beauty often is proud and trivial, yet
it is a manifestation of Him from whom all beauty comes, in whom all
beauty dwells, by whom all beauty exists. And so not only thank--pray.
Pray to Him that the outward and visible may be ever more and more but an
expression of something inward and unseen and spiritual. For beauty,
grace, intellect, everything is doomed, unless it is sacramental--unless
it draws its life from God below, unless it lives but to testify of Him
who is.

It is an awful problem--a beautiful face with no true moral beauty
below--splendid physical grace with no deeper grace beneath--a strong,
capable intellect which is not the expression of a noble soul. What does
it all mean? How in a world, where the outward and visible is but a
manifestation of the {79} good God, can such awful anomalies exist?
Partly it is due to the law that goodness is rewarded to a thousand
generations (Exodus xx. 6. R.V. margin, cf. Deut. vii. 9), while
wickedness is visited upon the third and fourth--that is, that one who is
beautiful in body or intellect, and who knows God, leaves the blessing of
such beauty long after him to descendants who are little conscious of the
reason of its origin, and who have little thought of God.

Beautiful eyes, where there is no beauty of soul beneath, are the eyes of
others, long since dead, looking at us still--men who served God in their
generation. An exquisitely touching voice, where there is no music in
the life of the one who possesses it, may be the voice of one who knew
God, and left his legacy for a thousand generations. But still the
problem remains. In many cases the outward and inward seem divorced.
Now let us not try rashly to solve the problem ourselves. We are
inclined when we see such beauty to say, 'It is no use talking. I am
quite sure, whatever you say, that the