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of beauty in works of God's creation, it is solely with the work of man's hands that those arts have to busy themselves. The closer, in his creations, man can approach to the principles which God has exhibited in his creations, the higher and purer will be the emotions of delight experienced on the sight of man's humble followings in the footsteps of his Creator.
We should imperfectly convey an idea of the nature of Fine Art in anything like a state of high perfection, if we failed to notice the identity of, or at any rate connection between, the class of emotions we derive from an inspection of the noblest monuments of Fine Art, and such moral sentiments as may be derived from the philosophical study of many of the attributes of the Divinity. Those attributes which in some of their highest forms take the shape of good, true, beautiful, enduring, perfect, in the highest degree, are all qualities we recognise and appreciate as most sublime in works of the Fine Arts. Happily, there is, running through all God's works, and all the ideas which spring from the study of His works, so perfect a strain of harmonious relation between the greatest and the smallest, that we cannot but perceive principles of eternal unity in the works of an all-bountiful Deity, which give us, as it were, the keynote to test the harmony of all we would ourselves strive to produce. Man's efforts in creation should be to emulate the purity and excellence of all that God has made, and hence, while we correctly recognise man's Art in striving to originate and perpetuate Beauty as Fine Art, we should recognise God's Art, not as Fine, but as Divine Art.
It is perhaps due to this very principle of concord deduced from the careful study of Divine Art, binding together all the ideas connected with every branch of Æsthetics, that we find our consideration of the nature of Fine Art has already gone far to foreshadow our reply to the question of "why should Fine Art be studied?"