It
is illustrated on the grand scale by the imagery of war. In the
beginning war for its own sake, mere fighting, is the subject; then war
for a cause, which ennobles it beyond the power of personal prowess and
justifies it as an element in national life; next, war for love, which
refines it and builds the paradox of the deeds of hate serving the will
of courtesy; last, war for the soul's salvation, which is unseen battle
within the breast. Achilles, Aeneas, Lancelot, the Red Cross Knight are
the terms in this series; they mark the transformation of the most
savage act of man into the symbol of his highest spiritual effort.
Nature herself is subject to this inwardness of art; at first merely
objective as a condition, and usually a hostile, or at least dangerous,
condition of human life, she becomes the witness to omnipotent power in
illimitable beauty and majesty, its infinite unknowableness, and its
tender care for all creatures, as in the Scriptures; and at last the
words of our Lord concentrate, in some simple flower, the profoundest of
moral truths,--that the beauty of the soul is the gift of God, out of
whose eternal law it blossoms and has therein its ever living roots, its
air and light, its inherent grace and sweetness: "Consider the lilies of
the field, how they grow: they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I
say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like
one of these.
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