religion, is very imperfect and not at all Biblical.  Shelley’s feelings for the spirit of Beauty are exquisitely fine, but under the light of the Bible they are seen to be only latently religious.  A more penetrating-vision will see in the Ideal Beauty a Moral Form, and then aesthetics will translate itself into ethics.  The unmoral sentiment of a Shelley for Beauty may issue in another generation in the immoral sentiment of a Swinburne.  Even thus the vision of the Aphrodite sank into the dream of a Venus.  An Oscar Wilde’s maunderings over an art which has no reference to morality may possibly be poetry, but they certainly are not religion according to the Bible, for all his blasphemous apostrophes to Christ between his praises of licentious love.  Hard as the granitic core of earth is the core of religion in the Bible.

The “stern law-giver” of Israel was Duty.  Her supreme authority, which enjoined with absolute command the most unpleasant action, was—­“I ought.”  She saw that “laws mighty and brazen” bind man to a right, which he may distort or deny, but cannot destroy—­his Saviour or his Judge.  Mystic in its sacredness, Conscience sat shrined within the soul of the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost; her voice the very voice of God.  The Power in whom we live and move and have our being is revealed in these books as the Eternal Righteousness.  The moral law is seen to be the throne of the Most High.

In Emerson’s phrase: 

   Virtue is the adopting of this dictate of the Universal Mind by the
   individual will.

“What do I love when I love Thee?” sighed Augustine.  Israel might have answered that question in Augustine’s own words: 

Not the beauty of bodies, nor the fair harmony of time, nor the brightness of the light so gladsome to our eyes, nor sweet melodies of varied songs, nor the fragrant smell of flowers and ointments and spices, not manna and honey.  None of these do I love when I love my God; and yet I love a kind of light, a kind of melody, a kind of fragrance, a kind of food, when I love my God,—­the light, the melody, the fragrance, the food of the inner man.  This it is which I love when I love my God.[58]

But the Bible answer would be much more simple and pungent: 

   O ye that love the Lord, see that ye hate the thing which is evil.... 
   If a man say I love God and hateth His brother he is a liar.

This is the fundamental secret of the power of the Bible.  The love of goodness and the love of God are one.  Aspiration is unconscious worship, and worship is aspiration conscious of its object.

   Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

But this noble conception of the unity of ethical and spiritual life has many aspects in the Bible.  The Bible turns upon us every phase in which Wisdom reveals herself to the sons of men, so that no ray of her light is lost, and that every one, however he may stand related to her, receives her heavenly beams.