of inspiration working normally instead of by the special act and favour of God.  As beauty, again, he shows forth the enthusiasm evoked by the ideal in the image of the charioteer of the white and black horses mastering them to the goal of love.  In these various ways the first idealist thought out these distinctions of truth and beauty as having a real community, though a divided life in the mind and heart; and, as he developed,—­and this is the significant matter,—­the poet in him controlling his speech told ever more eloquently of the charm with which beauty draws the soul unto itself, for to the poet beauty is nearer than truth.  It is the persuasion with which he sets forth this charm, rather than his speculation, which has fastened upon him the love of later ages.  He was the first to discern in truth and beauty equal powers of one divine being, and thus to effect the most important reconciliation ever made in human nature.

So, too, from the other great source of the race’s wisdom, we are told in the Scriptures that though we be fallen men, yet is it left to us to lift our eyes to the beauty of holiness and be healed; for every ray of that outward loveliness which strikes upon the eye penetrates to the heart of man.  Then are we moved, indeed, and incited to seek virtue with true desire.  Prophet and psalmist are here at one with the poet and the philosopher in spiritual sensitiveness.  At the height of Hebrew genius in the personality of Christ, it is the sweet attractive grace, the noble beauty of the present life incarnated in his acts and words, the divine reality on earth and not, as Plato saw it, in a world removed, that has drawn all eyes to the Judean hill.  The years lived under the Syrian blue were a rending of the veil of spiritual beauty which has since shone in its purity on men’s gaze.  It is this loveliness which needs only to be seen that wins mankind.  The emotions are enlisted; and, however we may slight them in practice, the habit of emotion more than the habit of mind enters into and fixes inward character.  More men are saved by the heart than by the head; more youths are drawn to excellence by noble feelings than are coldly reasoned into virtue on the ground of gain.  Some there are among men so colourless in blood that they embrace the right on the mere calculation of advantage, but they seem to possess only an earthly virtue; some, beholding the order of the world, desire to put themselves in tune with nature and the soul’s law, and these are of a better sort; but most fortunate are they who, though well-nurtured, find virtue not in profit, nor in the necessity of conforming to implacable law, but in mere beauty, in the light of her face as it first comes to them with ripening years in the sweet and noble nature of those they grow to love and honour among the living and the dead.  For this is Achilles made brave, that he may stir us to bravery; and surely it were little to see the story of Pelops’ line if the emotions were not awakened, not merely for a few moments of intense action of their own play, but to form the soul.  The emotional glow of the creative imagination has been once mentioned in the point that it is often more absorbed in the beauty and passion than in the intellectual significance of its work; here, correspondingly, it is by the heart to which it appeals rather than by the mind it illumines that it takes hold of youth.