are all the sermons and theologies of that time in comparison with those great old monuments of Christian Art?  “The immortal mind craves objects that endure.”  And immortality itself, the spirit of celestial order, a beauty that awes while it charms, and chastens while it kindles, are imaged in the aspect and countenance of those structures.  And it is remarkable that nothing has come down to us touching the persons of those grand old builders, not even their names.  It seems indeed as if their great souls had been so possessed by the genius that stirred within them, so entranced in the contemplation of their religious ideals, as to leave no room, for any self-regarding thoughts; so that we know them only as a band of anonymous immortals.

    “They were pedants who could speak: 
    Grander souls have passed unheard;
    Such as found all language weak;
    Choosing rather to record
    Secrets before Heaven, than break
    Faith with Angels by a word.”

Now it is the nature of Christian meaning thus embodied to penetrate and pervade the depths of the mind without agitating its surface; and when the effect is greatest, then it is that the mind is least conscious of it:  it is a silent efficacy that “sweetly creeps into the study of imagination,” and charms its way into “the eye and prospect of the soul” by delicacy of touch and smoothness of operation.  Such art is of course in no sort an intellectual gymnastic.  It is as complex and many-sided as our nature itself; and the frame of mind from which it proceeds, and which it aims to inspire, is that calmness wherein is involved a free and harmonious exercise of the whole man; sense, intellect, and heart moving together in sympathy and unison:  in a word, it is the fitting expression of

      “That monumental grace
    Of Faith, which doth all passions tame
      That reason should control;
    And shows in the untrembling frame
      A statue of the soul.”

From such workmanship, every thing specially stimulant of any one part of the mind, every thing that ministers to the process of self-excitation, every thing that fosters an unhealthy consciousness by untuning the inward harmonies of our being, every thing that appeals to the springs of vanity and self-applause, or invites us to any sort of glass-gazing pleasure,—­every such thing is, by an innate law of the work, excluded.  So that here we have the right school of moral healthiness, a moral digestion so perfect as to be a secret unto itself.  The intelligence, the virtue, the piety, that grows by such methods, is never seen putting on airs, or feeding on the reflection of its own beauty; but evermore breathes freely and naturally, as in communion with the proper sources of its life.