262 LORD GRIMTHORPE 
without milk would not produce either milk or children. 
Living creatures must either be immortal, or must cease, or 
be reproductive ; but that would not take them a single step 
towards reproduction, or perform the seeming miracle and the 
yet inexplicable mystery involved in it; for its universality 
leaves it no less wonderful than the first time it happened. 
But these things must have been done somehow, if there 
was to be a living world at all. Beauty need not. It is 
altogether a gratuitous exhibition of perfection. Look at the 
hideous things we make for all purposes, and continually more 
and more hideous as we advance in science. Why does not 
nature make its necessary works hideous, too? Why are 
teeth, and eyes, and hair, and feathers, more beautiful than 
coffee-mills, and telescopes, and ropes, and the paddles of 
steamboats, or than our own bones and entrails or body 
without skin? A single blotch ona face ruins its beauty. 
How came most young faces to have the beautifully-arranged 
colours that belong to them in health? Except the arts of 
painting, sculpture, and building for a few centuries, we 
can hardly make anything that gives any lasting pleasure, 
even to ourselves, and except when we call in nature 
to help us, which is always ready, as when we ‘ make” 
gardens, as we say—though we do not really make them, 
but only invite nature in a certain way. Where then 
is the real factory from which all this infinity of never- 
failing and never-blundering art is being continually turned 
out, and who is the artist that invents it all? When the 
Spencers and Huxleys, and their fraternity, have tried their 
answers to these questions (which they never do), we may 
consider whether our side of the case needs arguing further. 
At present it does not. The factory of the beauty of the 
worldjis not chance, for chance is infinitely against it. It is 
not ourselves, for it is all prior to ourselves, and we can make 
hardly any when we try. It is some person with evidently 
unlimited mental resources and power to make every atom 
behave as he chooses, both for use and beauty. 
People who call themselves ‘‘ thinkers”? write sententious 
and pretentious nonsense about the impossibility of mind 
influencing matter, merely because they do not know the 
modus operand?. But something or other has influenced 
matter to make it assume beautiful forms, chiefly for our 
delight, as far as we can see, and very likely to show us how 
vastly inferior our own conceptions of perfection are to those 
of the Divine mind. For if this is not to be called Mind, what 
is it? If any one is prepared to argue that self-existing 
force in no particular direction has resolved itself sponta- 
