p. 13 | The Beautiful

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 8, 1910

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 37, No. 10.

The Beautiful

THERE is a fine passage from the pen of John Ruskin, in which he rebukes a certain section of the men of his time for their indifference to the beautiful and their neglect of its elevating power. “People speak,” he says, “in this working age, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment, were alone useful; and as if sight, thought, and admiration, were all profitless. They would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables; men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than life, and the raiment than the body; who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers and husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew and the water they draw are better than the vine forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move like His eternity.” To such is awarded the curse of Nebuchadnezzar, whose crown of kingship was taken from his brow, while he herded with the beasts who are blind to the beautiful and unstirred by its divine appeal.—Great Thoughts.