Page:Aesthetic Papers.djvu/106

96 Without going any farther into minutiæ, we may finally speak of the spirit of the Dorian education. It was purely human. It began and ended in man. From the exercises of the gymnasium even to the possession and exercise of political power, there was nothing proposed for pursuit beyond the excellence attained, and the honor of that. We see in Homer's time, that prizes of real value were proposed to the Achæan victors, in contests of strength and skill. But with the Dorians, crowns of no intrinsic value were the prizes,—mere symbols of an excellence which was its own reward. The Dorian strength and beauty continued unimpaired just so long as they could thus symbolize the "superiority of man to his accidents." The son of the morning fell, as soon as his eye turned from the worship of objective truth to subjective indulgence: and his works did follow him; the grand style rapidly giving place to effeminacy, until, where Æschylus had been, was Seneca the Roman tragedian; and every thing in proportion. "The ancients described beauty," said Goethe; "the moderns describe beautifully."

But the Dorian culture was applied only to a fragment of the great race of humanity: it was the perfect form of one wave which has passed away on the tide of time. The question is, May the great flood itself take this perfect form? Can Christ govern mankind as completely as Apollo governed the Dorians?

In order to this, religion must enspirit political forms as truly with us as with them, and an adequate education conserve them. Being Americans, we can take leave to skip the difficult task of legitimating, upon the doctrine of Christianity, the states of modern Europe. We doubt whether any philosopher of history may do that. It is our privilege to live under political forms that it is not difficult to trace quite immediately to our religion. For the United States, in its germ, was a Christian colony; and the oracle which directed it was deeper in the breasts of the Pilgrims than they themselves knew, or could adequately unfold, either in doctrine or practice. But later times have read the writing; and the fathers of the Federal Constitution built the temple,