Page:Religion of a Sceptic (IA religionofscepti00powy).djvu/44

bringing into being a new appreciation of beauty; and not only a new appreciation, but certain actual secrets of beauty, such as, until it appeared, remained merely latent in the nature of the universe.

Nothing is harder than to define the precise quality of this new element; but it is certainly something that does not confine itself to human minds. It extends to stones and plants and trees. It extends to every smallest incident of our days; to the lighting of fires, to the washing of hands, to the breaking of bread. It saturates the very idea of love in the world, of the most amorous love as well as the most intellectualized.

Evil and sinister is that Puritan Heresy that has made of the pleasures of the senses something alien to the spirit of Christ; though it must be confessed that such a view is not without its justification in the "logoi" of the historic Jesus!

But the Christ of the Virgin Birth has liberated himself from the historic Jesus; and all the strange loveliness in the world which draws its life from Him, all the subtleties and nuances of poetry which depend upon Him, are liberated with His liberation from his gloomy moralistic perversion.

The "Idiot" of Dostoievsky, which of all modern works of art contains most of this new sense of beauty, by no means exhausts its possi-