The Apostle of Beauty.

He is not of the twelve, any more than the golden rule is of the ten.  “A greater commandment I give unto you,” was said of that.  Also it was called the “new commandment.”  Yet it was really older than the rest, and greater only because it included them all.  There were those who kept it ages before Moses went up Sinai:  Joseph, for instance, his ancestor; and the king’s daughter, by whose goodness he lived.  So stands the Apostle of Beauty, greater than the twelve, newer and older; setting Gospel over against law, having known law before its beginning; living triumphantly free and unconscious of penalty.

He has had martyrdom, and will have.  His church is never established; the world does not follow him; only of Wisdom is he known, and of her children, who are children of light.  He never speaks by their mouths who say “Shalt not.”  He knows that “shalt not” is illegitimate, puny, trying always to usurp the throne of the true king, “Thou shalt.”

“This is delight,” “this is good to see,” he says of a purity, of a fair thing.  It needs not to speak of the impurity, of the ugliness.  Left unmentioned, unforbidden, who knows how soon they might die out of men’s lives, perhaps even from the earth’s surface?  Men hedging gardens have for centuries set plants under that “letter of law” which “killeth,” until the very word hedge has become a pain and an offence; and all the while there have been standing in every wild country graceful walls of unhindered brier and berry, to which the apostles of beauty have been silently pointing.  By degrees gardeners have learned something.  The best of them now call themselves “landscape gardeners;” and that is a concession, if it means, as I suppose it does, that they will try to copy Nature’s landscapes in their enclosures.  I have seen also of late that on rich men’s estates tangled growths of native bushes are being more let alone, and hedges seem to have had some of the weights and harness taken off of them.

This is but one little matter among millions with which the Apostle of Beauty has to do; but it serves for instance of the first requisite he demands, which is freedom.  “Let use take care of itself.”  “It will,” he says.  “There is no beauty without freedom.”

Nothing is too high for him, nothing too low or small.  To speak more truly, in his eyes there is no small, no low.  From a philanthropy down to a gown, one catholic necessity, one catholic principle; gowns can be benefactions or injuries; philanthropies can be well or ill clad.

He has a ministry of co-workers,—­men, women, and guileless little children.  Many of them serve him without knowing him by name.  Some who serve him best, who spread his creeds most widely, who teach them most eloquently, die without dreaming that they have been missionaries to Gentiles.  Others there are who call him “Lord, Lord,” build temples to him and teach in them, who never know him.