Take first a few examples from the domain of art. The body and limbs
of the Gladiator in the Louvre may be cited as the exponent of
corporeal beauty; the face of the Apollo Belvedere as that of
intellectual and physical; and the Santo Sisto Madonna of Raphael, and
the Christ of the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, for spiritual.
Through these radiant creations we look into the transcendent minds of
their artists with a chastened, exalting joy, not unmingled with pride
in our brotherhood with such beauty-lifted co-workers with God.
Among the higher races, life is affluent in examples of the three
kinds of beauty, two of them, and even all three, at times united in
one subject. Children and youth offer the most frequent instances of
physical beauty. Napoleon's face combined in high degree both physical
and intellectual, without a trace of moral beauty. Discoveries in
science, and the higher scientific processes, as likewise broad and
intense intellectual action, exemplify often intellectual beauty. Of
moral beauty history preserves examples which are the brightest
jewels, and the most precious, in the casket of mankind's memory;
among the most brilliant of which are the trust of Alexander, when he
drank the draught from the hand of his physician, though warned that
it was poisoned; the fidelity of the paroled Regulus, returning from
Rome to the enemy into the jaws of a certain and cruel death;
Sir Philip Sidney, wounded unto death, taking the cup of water
untasted from his parched lips, to give it to a dying soldier; Luther
at the Diet of Worms; the public life of Washington; the life and
death of Socrates, and especially that last act of washing his body to
save the women the trouble of washing it a few hours later, when it
would be a corpse; and, lastly, that most beautiful of lives and most
sublime of deaths, which live in the heart of Christendom as its
exemplar and ever fresh ideal.
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