irst, with what parting of plume, and what soft pressure and
rhythmic beating of divided air, she reaches that miraculous swiftness
of undubious motion, compared with which the tempest is slow, and the
arrow uncertain; and secondly, what clew there is, visible, or
conceivable to thought of man, by which, to her living conscience and
errorless pointing of magnetic soul, her distant home is felt afar
beyond the horizon, and the straight path, through concealing clouds,
and over trackless lands, made plain to her desire, and her duty, by the
finger of God.

283. And lastly, since in the tradition of the Old Covenant she was made
the messenger of forgiveness to those eight souls saved through the
baptism unto death, and in the Gospel of the New Covenant, under her
image, was manifested the well-pleasing of God, in the fulfillment of
all righteousness by His Son in the Baptism unto life,--surely alike all
Christian people, old and young, should be taught to be gladdened by her
sweet presence; and in every city and village in Christendom she should
have such home as in Venice she has had for ages, and be, among the
sculptured marbles of the temple, the sweetest sculpture; and,
fluttering at your children's feet, their never-angered friend. And
surely also, therefore, of the thousand evidences which any carefully
thoughtful person may see, not only of the ministration of good, but of
the deceiving and deadly power of the evil angels, there is no one more
distinct in its gratuitous, and unreconcilable sin, than that this--of
all the living creatures between earth and sky--should be the one chosen
to amuse the apathy of our murderous idleness, with skill-less,
effortless, merciless slaughter.

284. I pass to the direct subject on which I have to speak finally
to-day;--the reality of that ministration of the good angels, and of
that real adversity of the principalities and powers of Satan, in which,
without exception, all earnest Christians have believed, and the
appearance of which, to the imagination of the greatest and holiest of
them, has been the root, without exception, of all the greatest art
produced by the human mind or hand in this world.

That you have at present no art properly so called in England at
all--whether of painting, sculpture, or architecture[179]--I, for one,
do not care. In midst of Scottish Lothians, in the days of Scott, there
was, by how much less art, by so much purer life, than in the midst of
Ita