The secret of
those old shapers died with them; their wand is broken, their book sunk
deeper than ever plummet sounded. The type of their work is the Greek
Temple, which leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfection of
design, in harmony and subordination of parts, and in entireness of
impression. But in this aesthetic completeness it ends. It rests solidly
and complacently on the earth, and the mind rests there with it.
Now the Christian idea has to do with the human soul, which Christianity
may be almost said to have invented. While all Paganism represents a few
pre-eminent families, the founders of dynasties or ancestors of races, as
of kin with the gods, Christianity makes every pedigree end in Deity,
makes monarch and slave the children of one God. Its heroes struggle not
against, but upward and onward _toward_, the higher powers who are always
on their side. Its highest conception of beauty is not aesthetic, but
moral. With it prosperity and adversity have exchanged meanings. It finds
enemies in those worldly good-fortunes where Pagan and even Hebrew
literature saw the highest blessing, and invincible allies in sorrow,
poverty, humbleness of station, where the former world recognized only
implacable foes. While it utterly abolished all boundary lines of race or
country and made mankind unitary, its hero is always the individual man
whoever and wherever he may be.
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