bless every soul of saint or sinner, Rev. Banbaby? Oh, foolish congregations of self-denying men, who think you must believe in all the clerical nonsense and bad-sense which ministers preach at yon 1 where are your eyes, where are your hearts, where are your souls, that you make such a fuss about?
’Why this longing, this for ever sighing
For such doctrines ghastly, hateful, grim,—
While the Beautiful, all round thee lying,
Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?
Would'st thou listen to its gentle teaching,
All that restless longing it would still,—
Flower and pond and laden bee are teaching,
Thy own sphere with natural work to fill.' "
Mr Welltodo is right; that is the meaning of it all. Love sums it up: "All things are double"—use this, beauty that: Old Testament and New Testament are thus bound up in the same volume of Nature. What a revelation of God's goodness this world of beauty is! How it comes to the tired young milliner, soothes her weariness, quickens her imagination, and then laps her in the arms of sleep, till all is joyous, blessed rest ! No, in that rest she longs for another tranquillity, — the soul's rest in the infinite perfections of God.
How this mundane beauty comes to the calculating man, lifts him above his "sugars" and his "flours" he meant to spend all Sunday in thinking over; and shows him the heavenly meaning in this life of ours!
What a revelation it is of the Cause and Providence of all this world! God gives us use! "giveth liberally." You might expect it. But that is not enough for Him. He adds another world, which feeds and cheers the superior faculties. There is use for need and virtue, beauty also as overplus and for delight. We ask corn for bread; God makes it handsome and it feeds the mind. It seems to me as if He could not give enough to satisfy his own benevolence. How he spreads a table with all that is needful for material wants, and then gives this beauty as a musical benediction to the feast,—a grace before and after meat! To a thoughtful man, how the sight of this wakens emotions of reverence, love, and trust! Who can doubt the causal Goodness which makes the fairness?
