But the point which these remarks are chiefly meant to enforce is, that there is no true beauty of Art but what takes its life from the inspirations of religious awe; and that even in our highest intellectual culture the intellect itself will needs be demoralized, unless it be toned to order by a supreme reference to the Divine will.  There is no true school of mental health and vigour and beauty, but what works under the presidency of the same chastening and subduing power.  Our faculties of thought and knowledge must be held firmly together with a strong girdle of modesty, else they cannot possibly thrive; and to have the intellect “undevoutly free,” loosened from the bands of reverence, is a sure pledge and forecast of intellectual shallowness and deformity.[7]

[7] Since this was written, I have met with some capital remarks, closely bordering upon the topic, in Mr. J.C.  Shairp’s Studies in Poetry and Philosophy, a book which I cannot but regard as one of the choicest contributions to the literature of our time.  The passage is in his essay on The Moral Dynamic, near the end: 

“There are things which, because they are ultimate ends in themselves, refuse to be employed as means, and, if attempted to be so employed, lose their essential character.  Religion is one, and the foremost of these things.  Obedience, conformity of the finite and the imperfect will of man to the infinite and perfect will of God, this, which is the essence of religion, is an end in itself, the highest end which we can conceive.  It cannot be sought as a means to an ulterior end without being at once destroyed.  This is an end, or rather the end in itself, which culture and all other ends by right subserve.  And here in culture, as in pleasure, the great ethic law will be found to hold, that the abandoning of it as an end, in obedience to a higher, more supreme aim, is the very condition of securing it.  Stretch the idea of culture, and of the perfection it aims at, wide as you will, you cannot, while you make it your last end, rise clear of the original self-reference that lies at its root; this you cannot get rid of, unless you go out of culture, and beyond it, abandoning it as an end, and sinking it into what it really is,—­a means, though perhaps the highest means, towards full and perfect duty. No one ever really became beautiful by aiming at beauty.  Beauty comes, we scarce know how, as an emanation from sources deeper than itself.  If culture, or rather the ends of culture, are to be healthy and natural growths, they must come unconsciously, as results of conformity to the will of God, sought not for any end but itself.”—­“It cannot indeed be denied that these two, culture or the love of beauty, religion or the love of godliness, appear in individuals, in races, in ages, as rival, often as conflicting, forces.  The votary of beauty shrinks from religion as something stern and ungenial, the devout Puritan discards