own in dry places,
finding no rest, ever and anon doing something noble, and yet not
following it up, but dwelling the next instant on something impure or
profitless with the same intensity and yet impatience, so that they are
ever wondered at and never sympathized with, and while they dazzle all,
they lead none; and then, beneath these again, we find others on whose
works there are definite signs of evil mind, ill-repressed, and then
inability to avoid, and at last perpetual seeking for and feeding upon
horror and ugliness, and filthiness of sin, as eminently in Salvator and
Caravaggio, and the lower Dutch schools, only in these last less
painfully as they lose the villanous in the brutal, and the horror of
crime in its idiocy.

Sec. 8. Greatness and truth are sometimes by the Deity sustained and spoken
in and through evil men.

But secondly, it is to be noted that it is neither by us uncertainable
what moments of pure feeling or aspiration may occur to men of minds
apparently cold and lost, nor by us to be pronounced through what
instruments, and in what strangely occurrent voices, God may choose to
communicate good to men. It seems to me that much of what is great, and
to all men beneficial, has been wrought by those who neither intended
nor knew the good they did, and that many mighty harmonies have been
discoursed by instruments that had been dumb or discordant, but that
God knew their stops. The Spirit of Prophecy consisted with the avarice
of Balaam, and the disobedience of Saul. Could we spare from its page
that parable, which he said, who saw the vision of the Almighty, falling
into a trance, but having his eyes open, though we know that the sword
of his punishment was then sharp in its sheath beneath him in the plains
of Moab? or shall we not lament with David over the shield cast away on
the Gilboa mountains, of him to whom God gave _another heart_ that day
when he turned his back to go from Samuel? It is not our part to look
hardly, nor to look always, to the character or the deeds of men, but to
accept from all of them, and to hold fast that which we can prove good,
and feel to be ordained for us. We know that whatever good there is in
them is itself divine, and wherever we see the virtue of ardent labor
and self-surrendering to a single purpose, wherever we find constant
reference made to the written scripture of natural beauty, this at least
we know is great and good, this we know is not granted