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of a steady and protracted harmony. Moreover, there is repose in them. The mind is filled with the satisfaction which truth, beauty and virtue afford; without stimulating an excessive activity, they momentarily reward it. It is not merely a good in advance, but one in possession, that gives to the contemplation of beauty, of physical and moral excellence, a supreme and abiding pleasure. The concurrent reward and stimulus of the faculties take from them the intense thirst of desire, the restless, insatiate longing of intellectual emotions, expanding the circle each instant, and finding it forever made up of the same futile pleasures in greater multiplicity.

Again, the rational gratifications increase in scope and in purity of tone. They arise from intellections which, with the growth of mind, become broader, more varied and more just. They yield, therefore, to the esthetical and moral sense more extended, harmonious, and profound impressions. No one exhausts art, no one measures the resources of virtue, nor makes barren to the contemplation those plans and that providence which are working the world up, with all its stubborn and refractory materials, into a perfect and permanent product of religious art.

These pleasures owe their high character also to the extent in which they combine and blend all the activities of the triple powers of man. The intellect is most active in preparing the conditions, in giving the grounds of esthetical and ethical intuitions, while the intuitions combine inseparably perception and emotion. To see the true, the beautiful and the good is to feel their power. Nor is the will inactive. Under the surface of the mind, fully occupied with these noblest objects of contemplation, there flows a steady purpose to conform all action to them, never to mar them, to win them by becoming a part of them. Here is doubtless the secret of the repose, the rest of truth, art and virtue,