and leading thought cleaves not towards the sensual parts of
her. Her beneficence they sought, and her power they shunned, her
teaching through both, they understood never. The pleasant influences of
soft winds and ringing streamlets, and shady coverts; of the violet
couch, and plane-tree shade,[9] they received, perhaps, in a more noble
way than we, but they found not anything except fear, upon the bare
mountain, or in the ghostly glen. The Hybla heather they loved more for
its sweet hives than its purple hues. But the Christian theoria seeks
not, though it accepts, and touches with its own purity, what the
Epicurean sought, but finds its food and the objects of its love
everywhere, in what is harsh and fearful, as well as what is kind, nay,
even in all that seems coarse and commonplace; seizing that which is
good, and delighting more sometimes at finding its table spread in
strange places, and in the presence of its enemies, and its honey coming
out of the rock, than if all were harmonized into a less wondrous
pleasure; hating only what is self-sighted and insolent of men's work,
despising all that is not of God, unless reminding it of God, yet able
to find evidence of him still, where all seems forgetful of him, and to
turn that into a witness of his working which was meant to obscure it,
and so with clear and unoffended sight beholding him forever, according
to the written promise,--Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall
see God.

FOOTNOTES

[7] [Greek: hos dei, kai kath' hyperbolen kai elleipsin.]

[8] Comp. Hooker, Eccl. Pol. Book i. chap. 8.

[9] Plato, Phaedrus, Sec. 9.

CHAPTER III.

OF ACCURACY AND INACCURACY IN IMPRESSIONS OF SENSE.

Sec. 1. By what test is the health of the perceptive faculty to be
determined?

Hitherto we have observed only the distinctions of dignity among
pleasures of sense, considered merely as such, and the way in which any
of them may become theoretic in being received with right feeling.

But as we go farther, and examine the distinctive nature of ideas of
beauty, we shall, I believe, perceive something in them besides aesthetic
pleasure, which attests a more important function belonging to them than
attaches to other sensual ideas, and exhibits a more exalted character
in the faculty by which they are received. And this was what I alluded
to, when I said in the chapter already referred to (Sec. 1), that "we may
in