H The bold aeronaut who ascends through the invisible air not only looks up and beholds the ever-nearing blue heavens, but he also looks down, and lo ! because of his ascent, all he is leaving below him changes and becomes transfigured. Not only has the horizon of his outlook vastly extended, but the inequalities of level and the natural boundaries and differences of earth that seemed so insuperable when he walked thereon have vanished away. Hill and dale have melted into one dead level. City and country, field and moor, land and sea fade into each other. The towering mountain shrinks into a veritable molehill, and the broad, deep-flowing river dwindles to a silver thread. Such, I think, is no unfaithful symbol and picture of the inevitable two-
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fold effect on those happy souls who ascend in the atmosphere of the spiritual. Nay, may I not go further in this analogy and say that just as the aeronaut proves and measures his ascent towards the blue sky by the altering appearance of the earth he looks down upon — being so much nearer to the latter than he is to the former — so a man's upward approach to God is most surely measured by his altering view of humanity ? "We know that Isaiah had ascended into the heavenlies because he wrote this text.i
i. The King in His Beauty.
What is beauty ? The best definition is an old one. " The essence of the beautiful consists in amplitude and order " (Arist. Poet. vii.). The suhlime and the 'pretty are two opposite modifica- tions. The suhlwie is the beautiful with its amplitude pushed into indefinite vastness and the tender smile, which is the inevit- able tribute, exchanged for a certain awe. The pretty is at the opposite end of the measurement. It is beauty so reduced on the scale as to want the nobility of seriousness ; so petty that our admiration is not without a certain intermixture of contempt. The beautiful, when it approaches the verge of terror at one extreme or of contempt at the other, when it begins to be feared or patronised, may soon have to be called by another name. The soul and the actions of man are properly, and not merely by analogy, termed beautiful. There are natures so large and so conformed to moral harmony that we instinctively term them beautiful. There are actions which show so much of the beauty of the soul from which they proceed that we call them also beautiful.
1[ To the carnal eye, John Bunyan dwelt within the narrow walls of Bedford jail, with only coarse and painful things to con- template and suffer ; but his spiritual imagination made him live in a country where it was summer the year round. He dwelt in the Palace Beautiful, climbed the Hill Beulah, heard golden trumpets, saw the city of gems and glass lighted witli the glory of God.
1. We are so framed by God as to experience delight in the contemplation of objects which we term beautiful. Take, for instance, the beauties of nature, as they are called. With dimmed vision and burdened heart man can snatch from the faded loveli-
1 C, E. P. Antram.
196 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
nesa of a sin-stained earth moments of refreshment that make him purer and stronger for the task he has to perform here. Who does not feel this ? Who does not take pleasure in form and colour ? Who does not love to look at a green field or a garden of flowers ; at a clump of trees, or a stream of water gliding and sparkling through the thickness of overhanging leaves ? Which of us has not been sometimes drawn away from busy or anxious thoughts to look at an evening sky when the sun went down amidst piles of clouds that glowed and glittered as if they were mountains of jewels, or the far-off pinnacles of the golden city?
2. The beauty of humanity transcends all other beauty, and in the human countenance God has, as it were, sealed up the sum of its perfection. There is nothing in visible nature, in earth or sky, so beautiful to look upon as a beautiful face. The feeling is common to man everywhere, and at all time ; and it is a holy feeling. The admiration inspired by earthly beauty has something very sacred and mysterious in it, as all our deeper emotions have ; although for us, who know the truth of the Incarnation, the union of our nature with the Divine in the person of Christ, the mystery is cleared.
3. What, then, is that aspect or attribute of the human soul from which outward beauty springs ? It is not life only, nor mind, nor intellectual power. What is it? To. answer this question we have only to consider what is the characteristic attribute of the soul itself — that which is supreme over all others, which is inseparable from it, and belongs to its very essence. To us Christians, at any rate, the reply is at hand. That which distinguishes the soul, and makes it to be what it is, is its moral nature. Man was first created in the image of God, and when he lost it the Son of God became incarnate in order to restore it ; and that image the Scripture describes as consisting in righteousness and true holiness. The central attribute of the soul, then, is its moral character, and in this at last we find the source of outward beauty. In a word, it is goodness, and goodness alone, that sheds over the countenance this Divine lustre which men call beauty.