STRENGTH BLOSSOMING INTO BEAUTY.
Reading edition
If the greatest scientist is he who discerns some law of gravity that explains the forward movement of all stars and planets, if the great historian is he who unfolds one social principle that governs all nations, so he is the greatest moral teacher who discovers some unit idea that sweeps all details into one glorious unity, as did Channing when he said, "Let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common." All undefined and indefinable the spiritual glow and beauty that lie upon the soul, like the soft bloom upon a ripe peach. What song is to the birds, what culture is to the intellect, and eloquence is to the orator, that the spiritual is to character. It is the soul made ample in faculty, fertile in resource, struck through and through with ripeness, and inflected toward Christ's own sympathy, self-sacrifice and love.
The spiritual element also explains the note of distinction in the highest life and art. Many of our modern painters have failed, because they have been fleshly. Mud shows in the bottom of their eyes. Their pictures are indeed so shallow that "a fly could wade through them without wetting its feet." Fra Angelico, preparing to paint, entered his closet, expelled every evil thought, subdued every unholy ambition, flung away anger and jealousy as one would fling away a club or dagger. Then, with face that shone with the divine light, upon his knees he painted his angels and seraphs, and the spiritual breaking through the common lent a radiant glow and an immortal beauty to his priceless pictures.
Certain pictures of Rubens are of "the earth, earthy." In painting them, the artist seems to have had no thought save of the flesh tints. The mood and soul of Rubens' Venus was nothing—her body everything. Here, beauty is only color deep. Paint is everything—spirit nothing. But with the great artists in their greatest moods, paint is at best only an incident, and for the soul aspirations and ideals as seen in vision hours are everything. Hope, faith, love, joy, peace, sympathy, self-sacrifice, humility—spiritual qualities these, that shine through the face, and transform the life.