as a fact; for such I think it clearly is.  I presume it will be granted, also, that as a general thing we need to have our places of worship and our religious services made far more beautiful than they are; and that indeed we cannot have too much of beauty in them, so that beauty be duly steeped in the grace and truth of Christian inspiration.  But Art has its dangers here as well as its uses:  especially it is apt to degenerate from a discipline of religious virtue into a mere relaxation, losing the severity that elevates and purifies, in what is merely pretty or voluptuous or pleasing.  It is therefore of the utmost consequence what style of beauty we cultivate, and how the tastes of people are set in this matter.

Now Christianity is indeed a great “beauty-making power”; but the Beauty which it makes and owns is a presence to worship in, not a bauble to play with, or a show for unbaptized entertainment and pastime.  It cannot be too austerely discriminated from mere ornament, and from every thing approaching a striking and sensational character.  Its right power is a power to chasten and subdue.  And it is never good for us, especially in our religious hours, to be charmed without being at the same time chastened.  Accordingly the highest Art always has something of the terrible in it, so that it awes you while it attracts.  The sweetness that wins is tempered with the severity that humbles; the smile of love, with the sternness of reproof.  And it is all the more beautiful in proportion as it knows how to bow the mind by the austere and hushing eloquence of its forms.  And when I speak of Art, or the creation of the Beautiful, as the highest and strongest expression of man’s intellectual soul, I must be understood to mean this order of the Beautiful:  for indeed the beauty (if it be not a sin to call it such) that sacrifices or postpones truth to pleasure is not good;

    “And that which is not good is not delicious
    To a well-govern’d and wise appetite.”

In all our use of Art, therefore, it stands us much in hand to know that true Beauty is indeed an awful as well as a pleasant thing; and that men are not in a good way when they have ceased to feel that it is so.  Nor can I deem our case a very hopeful one when we surrender ourselves to that style of beauty which pleases without chastening the soul.  For it is but too certain that when Art takes to gratifying such an unreligious taste, and so works its forces for the pleasing of men without touching them with awe, it becomes no better than a discipline of moral enervation.  Perhaps this same law would silence much of the voluble rhetoric with which a certain school of writers are wont to discourse of the great Miracle of Beauty which has been given to men in the life and character of the blessed Saviour.  For I must needs think that, if they duly felt the awfulness of that Beauty, their fluency would be somewhat repressed; and that their eloquence would be better if they feared more and flourished less.