Again, our perception of beauty affords us a glimpse of God.  The Greeks embodied loveliness in their statues of the Divine, because through the satisfaction which came to them from such exquisite figures their souls were soothed and uplifted.  They have left on record how the calm and majestic expression of a face carved by a Phidias quieted, charmed, strengthened them.  Dion Chrysostom says of the figure of the Olympian Zeus, “Whosoever among mortal men is most utterly toil-worn in spirit, having drunk the cup of many sorrows and calamities, when he stands before this image, methinks, must utterly forget all the terrors and woes of this mortal life.”  The Greek Christian fathers often tell us that the same sense of the infinitely Fair, which was roused in them by such sights, recurred in a higher degree when their thoughts dwelt upon the life and character of Jesus.  Clement of Alexandria says, “He is so lovely as to be alone loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true beauty.”  Our aesthetic and our religious experiences often merge; our response to beauty, whether in nature, or music, or a painting, becomes a response to God.  Wordsworth says of a lovely landscape that had stamped its views upon his memory: 

      Oft in lonely rooms, and mid the din
  Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
  In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
  Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
  And passing even into my purer mind
  With tranquil restoration:—­feelings too
  Of unremembered pleasure; such, perhaps,
  As have no slight or trivial influence
  On that best portion of a good man’s life,
  His little, nameless, unremembered acts
  Of kindness and of love.

Shelley, while insistently denying or defying all the gods of accepted religion, finds himself adoring

          that Beauty
  Which penetrates and clasps and fills the world,
  Scarce visible for extreme loveliness.

Surely the God Christians adore is in these experiences, though men know it not.  St. Augustine believed that “all that is beautiful comes from the highest Beauty, which is God.”  They who begin with the cult of Beauty may have a conception of the Divine that has nothing to do with, or is even opposed to, the God and Father of Jesus; but when His God is supreme, inspirations from all things lovely may vastly supplement our thought of Him.  “Music on earth much light upon heaven has thrown.”

Science, too, has its contribution to offer to our thought of Him who is over all and through all and in all.  Truth is one, and scientific investigation and religious experience are two avenues that lead to the one Reality faith names God.  Science of itself can never lead us beyond visible and tangible facts; but its array of facts may suggest to faith many things about the invisible Father, the Lord of all.  Present-day science with its emphasis upon continuity makes us think of a God who is no occasional