OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 5 



of beautiful things, whether literature, painting, sculpture or archi- 

 tecture, we need not fear for our quarter-century. In poetry it 

 has seen the finest work of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, 

 Lowell and Longfellow. Ruskin found in it a painter, Turner, 

 worthy of the highest praise. Of -course I am not competent to 

 judge, but I should not be surprised if the work of .the French 

 and English painters of this epoch should challenge older masters 

 in the race for immortality. Beautiful architecture, art creations, 

 have been witnessed in the great expositions, no less beautiful 

 because they were fragile — like dissolving cloud shapes on the 

 horizon. As I walked through the fairy land of the Chicago 

 exposition the word beautiful was always in my thought, and as 

 I saw the people streaming through, the toilers from distant 

 farms and workshops, I thought that these magnificent palaces, 

 as of wind and cloud, would live in their memories as a beautiful 

 dream forever, a joy, an education, an embodied ideal. Thus, 

 though the epoch we speak of cannot be said to be distinctively 

 artistic, in the same sense that it is distinctively scientific, we can 

 say that it has had famous high priests of art ; we can say that 

 beauty has been shed abroad in widest commonalty as at no ear- 

 lier time. Beauty, we may say, has become democratized by 

 international expositions, by the throwing open of museums of 

 art to the people, by the cheapening of noble literature, and the 

 introduction of fine illustrations through the magazines into com- 

 mon homes. We- are realizing today, that it must have been no 

 small part of the education of a citizen of ancient Athens, that 

 every morning he saw the sunlight reflected from the marbles of 

 the Parthenon and glancing from the helm of Pallas Athene. 



It is therefore in a time peculiarly fit that you establish your 

 Institute. In a small community like ours we need, for such a 

 work as you propose to do, to enlist all lovers of truth irrespec- 

 tive of religious creeds. Men of faith and men without faith can 

 alike be made welcome here on the common ground of truth that 

 can be proved, and beauty that can be felt and loved. Yes, they 

 can be welcomed in a common faith also, the faith of all thought- 

 ful and sincere men everywhere, that the truth is mighty and 

 will prevail, that the truth is right and ought to prevail. 



