The progress of beauty in modern times has not been in the direction of form or coloring or symmetry, simply, but toward wider distribution. In early times, its ministry was to kings and scholars; it has advanced by expanding. The pyramid of Gizeh, the most expensive monument ever seen, was reared to perpetuate the memory of a great Egyptian king. A country was drained of revenue and of life to regale the pride of one man. The Parthenon ministered to a few great men in Greece. The cathedrals of the middle ages blest and helped a wider circle. But it was left to the time which is ours to build churches and chapels, as broad in their aims and ministry as the life of humanity. The early poetry concerned itself about the wars of gods and the contentions of kings. But as the sacredness of human life came to be seen more and more, did it tend to catch within the sweep of its rhythm the incidents and traditions and loves of the common people. The ideal in our day is being worked out in fields of waving grain, into the cattle upon the hills, into the homes of the people. It is being turned into orchards and vineyards. It is being traced in vines and flowers over the poor man’s cottage. The ideals were once housed and confined in the museums; now they are being turned out into the street. It was once the custom to bring Venus and Diana, by the aid of the chisel, from rough marble. The tendency now is to put the beauty of Venus and the enterprise of Diana into the spirits of our women. Sublime conceptions were once mainly realized in temples and cathedrals, but now we would see them distributed into dwellings for families, into schools for children, and into churches for the true worship of God. We would see them in bridges spanning all the rivers, in mills grinding the people’s bread, in factories spinning their clothes, and in railroads transporting their products. We would see them lifted into an asylum for the blind, a shelter for the orphan, and a home for the aged and infirm. We would hear them in the whirl of the spindle, in the ring of the hammer, in the splash of the paddle, and in the sound of the flying train. We would hear them in the steady march of progress, and in the pulse-beats of the happy plowman. Beauty is to be used to stimulate human courage, to embellish human spirit, and to enlarge human thought. Life’s shadows are to be chased by the light of eternity’s day, and its tumult hushed by the repose of eternity’s harmony. The æsthetic element in man’s nature was appointed to receive the beauty provided for it. But it was to be God’s almoner; having received it, also freely to give it. Thus it was to be the power whose function should be to put the whole of life into terms of harmony. Bernard Palissy put his ideal into a white enamel for his pottery; Columbus worked his ideal into a new world; Morse left his in the electric telegraph; Cyrus W. Field turned his into the submarine cable; and Thomas A.