But not all saints and sinners are endowed with this joy and insight,
this quick sensitiveness to beauty. Some of them cannot find the
eternal and transcendent God in a loveliness which, by temperament,
they either underrate or do not really see. There are a great many
good people who cannot take beauty seriously. They become wooden and
suspicious and uncomfortable whenever they are asked to perceive or
enjoy a lovely object. Incredible though it seems, it appears to them
to be unworthy of any final allegiance, any complete surrender, any
unquestioning joy. But there are other ways in which they, too, may
come to this sense of transcendence, other aspects of experience which
also demand it. Most often it is just such folk who cannot perceive
beauty, because they are practical or scientific or condemned to mean
surroundings, who do feel to the full the grim force and terror of
the external world. Prudence, caution, hard sense are to the fore with
them! Very well; there, too, in these perceptions is an open door for
the human spirit to transcend its environment, get out of its physical
shell. The postulate of the absolute worth of beauty may be an
argument for God drawn from subjective necessity. But the postulate of
sovereign moral Being behind the tyranny and brutality of nature is
an argument of objective necessity as well; here we all need God to
explain the world.
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