From an artistic point of view this distinction is of small importance. AEsthetically, the Law of Crystallization is probably as useful in ministering to natural beauty as Vitality. What are more beautiful than the crystals of a snowflake? Or what frond of fern or feather of bird can vie with the tracery of the frost upon a window-pane? Can it be said that the lichen is more lovely than the striated crystals of the granite on which it grows, or the moss on the mountain side more satisfying than the hidden amethyst and cairngorm in the rock beneath? Or is the botanist more astonished when his microscope reveals the architecture of spiral tissue in the stem of a plant, or the mineralogist who beholds for the first time the chaos of beauty in the sliced specimen of some common stone? So far as beauty goes the organic world and the inorganic are one.
To the man of science, however, this identity of beauty signifies nothing. His concern, in the first instance, is not with the forms but with the natures of things. It is no valid answer to him, when he asks the difference between the moss and the cairngorm, the frost-work and the fern, to be assured that both are beautiful. For no fundamental distinction in Science depends upon beauty. He wants an answer in terms of chemistry, are they organic or inorganic? or in terms of biology, are they living or dead? But when he is told that the one is living and the other dead, he is in possession of a characteristic and fundamental scientific distinction. From this point of view, however much they may possess in common of material substance and beauty, they are separated from one another by a wide and unbridged gulf. The classification of these forms, therefore, depends upon the standpoint, and we should pronounce them like or unlike, related or unrelated, according as we judged them from the point of view of Art or of Science.
The drift of these introductory paragraphs must already be apparent. We propose to inquire whether among men, clothed apparently with a common beauty of character, there may not yet be distinctions as radical as between the crystal and the shell; and, further, whether the current classification of men, based upon Moral Beauty, is wholly satisfactory either from the standpoint of Science or of Christianity. Here, for example, are two characters, pure and elevated, adorned with conspicuous virtues, stirred by lofty impulses, and commanding a spontaneous admiration from all who look on them--may not this similarity of outward form be accompanied by a total dissimilarity of inward nature? Is the external appearance the truest criterion of the ultimate nature? Or, as in the crystal and the shell, may there not exist distinctions more profound and basal? The distinctions drawn between men, in short, are commonly based on the outward appearance of goodness or badness, on the ground of moral beauty or moral deformity--is this classification scientific? Or is there a deeper distinction between the Christian and the not-a-Christian as fundamental as that between the organic and the inorganic?
There can be little doubt, to begin with, that with the great majority of people religion is regarded as essentially one with morality. Whole schools of philosophy have treated the Christian Religion as a question of beauty, and discussed its place among other systems of ethics. Even those systems of theology which profess to draw a deeper distinction have rarely succeeded in establishing it upon any valid basis, or seem even to have made that distinction perceptible to others. So little, indeed, has the rationale of the science of religion been understood that there is still no more unsatisfactory province in theology than where morality and religion are contrasted, and the adjustment attempted between moral philosophy and what are known as the doctrines of grace.