Religion 8 7 



nature of beauty and the faculty by which 

 it is perceived are utterly beyond him. He 

 cannot but feel that the unconscious and 

 unobtrusive beauty of field and hedgerow 

 must have originated in obedience to some 

 primal instinct or in fulfilment of some 

 immanent desire, some lofty need quite 

 other than anything he recognises as 

 human. 



And if a poet witnessing the colours of 

 a sunset, for instance, or the profusion of 

 beauty with which snow mountains seem to 

 fling themselves to the heavens in districts 

 unpeopled and in epochs long before human 

 consciousness awoke upon the earth : if such 

 a seer feels the revelation weigh upon his 

 spirit with an almost sickening pressure, and 

 is constrained to ascribe this wealth and 

 prodigality of beauty to the joy of the 

 Eternal Being in His own existence, to an 

 anticipation as it were of the developments 

 which lie before the universe in which He 

 is at work, and which He is slowly tending 

 towards an unimaginable perfection it be- 



