“But perhaps you will ask:  Is not the sorrow of the heathen a vain thing?  What is it after all that they bewail?  To understand that, try to picture to yourselves what it is that they think they are losing.  Verily it is not a small matter, and it includes many things for which we and all mankind owe them a debt of gratitude.  We call ourselves Christians and are proud of the name; but we also call ourselves Hellenes, and are proud of that name too.  It was under the protection of the old gods, whose fall is about to be consummated, that the Greeks achieved marvellous deeds, nurturing the gifts of the intellect which the Almighty bestowed on their race, like faithful gardeners, and making them bring forth marvellous fruit.  In the realm of thought the Greek is sovereign of the nations, and he has given to perishable matter a perfection of form which has elevated and vivified it to immortality.  Nothing more beautiful has ever been imagined or executed, before or since, or by any other people, than was produced by Greece in its prime.  But perhaps you will ask, why did not the Redeemer come down among our fathers in those glorious days?  Because beauty, as they conceived and still conceive of it, is a mere perishable accident of matter, and because a race which thus devoted every thought and feeling to an inspired and fervent worship of beauty—­which was so absorbed in the contemplation of the visible, could have no longing for the invisible which is the real life that came down among us with the only-begotten Son of God.  Nevertheless Beauty is beautiful; and when the time shall come when the visible is married to the invisible, when eternal Truth is clothed in perfect form, then, and not till then, will the ideal which our fathers strove after in the great old days be realized, by the grace of the Saviour.

“But this visible beauty, which they so passionately cherished, does us good service too, so long as we do not allow it to dazzle us and lead us astray from the one thing needful.  To whom, if not to the heathen Hellenes, do our great teachers owe, under God, the noble art of coordinating their loftiest feelings, and casting them in forms which are intelligible to the Christian and at once instruct, delight, and edify him?  It was in a heathen school that each one of your pastors—­that even I, the humblest of them—­studied that rhetoric which enables me to utter with a flowing tongue the things which the Spirit gives me to speak to you; and if some day there are Christian schools, in which our sons may acquire the same power, they must adopt many of the laws devised by the heathen.  If in the future we are rich enough to raise churches to the Almighty, to the Virgin Mary and the great Saints, in any way worthy of their sublime merits, we shall owe our skill to the famous architects of heathen Hellas.  We are indebted to the arts of the heathen for a thousand things in daily use, beside numberless others that lend charm to existence.  Yes, my beloved, when we consider all they did for us we cannot in justice withhold our tribute of gratitude and admiration.