In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection,
culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry. Far
more than on our freedom, our population, and our industrialism, many
amongst us rely upon our religious organizations to save us. I have
called religion a yet more important manifestation of human nature than
poetry, because it has worked on a broader scale for perfection, and
with greater masses of men. But the idea of beauty and of a human nature
perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a
true and invaluable idea, though it has not yet had the success that the
idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a human
nature perfect on the moral side,--which is the dominant idea of
religion,--has been enabled to have; and it is destined, adding to
itself the religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern
the other.
The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion and poetry are
one, in which the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all
sides adds to itself a religious and devout energy, and works in the
strength of that, is on this account of such surpassing interest and
instructiveness for us, though it was,--as, having regard to the human
race in general, and, indeed, having regard to the Greeks themselves, we
must own,--a premature attempt, an attempt which for success needed the
moral and religious fibre in humanity to be more braced and developed
than it had yet been.
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