known to every scholar as depositories of numerous statues and temple sculptures. A brief reference to all these objects of art would far exceed the limits of a single article. We can judge of their number from those that have been so partially enumerated; for every Grecian city had its statues and temples. Enough, we trust, has been said to show the wealth of the Greeks in works of Plastic Art.

The suspicion might insinuate itself into some minds that, considering the almost incredible abundance of Grecian art, much of it must have been of an inferior quality. Such a suspicion is altogether unsupported by history and by surviving monuments. Both these attest the superiority of the Greeks, in Architecture and Sculpture, to all other nations, ancient or modern. Painting was cultivated by the Greeks, neither at so early a period, nor to the same extent with the two arts just mentioned. For this obvious reasons existed. One, is the difficulties of the art itself; and another is that painting, in early times, was not connected with the worship of the gods. Architecture and Sculpture were indebted from the first for their development to religion; and under its auspices they attained a perfection in Greece, which has been the admiration of all civilized nations.

"Art, properly speaking," observes no mean judge, "is but the mirror of nature. Whenever it steps beyond what we see and know of the natural world, it seeks the superhuman, and, therefore, strictly speaking, the impossible. Still there are conceptions with which the artist may clothe his work that savor so directly of spiritual life, finding their being in his imagination, as to elevate our feeling above the ordinary range of creation, and bring us nigher to the throne of God. Yet even in these cases it will be found that all forms are borrowed of earth, and made typically or supernaturally beautiful, only through the ennobling power of imagination, seeking its ideal forms in realms of perpetual bliss. The ideal of earnest poetry consists in the union and harmonious melting down and fusion of the sensual into the spiritual — of man as an animal into man as a power of reason and self-governAnd this we have represented to us most clearly in the plastic art, or statuary of the Greek; where the perfection of outward form is a symbol of the perfection of an inward idea; where the body is wholly penetrated by the soul, and spiritualized even to a state of

glory; and, like a transparent substance, the matter, in its own nature darkness, becomes altogether a vehicle and fixture of light, a means of developing its beauties, and unfolding its wealth of various colors, without disturbing its unity, or causing a division of the parts.

"The Greeks understood this spiritual portraying of their subjects, perhaps better than their mechanical execution. In their art there is a marked central point, to which the common interest and less individualities tend; a nice distribution of attributes, subtle discrimination of character, and all those higher artistic truths, which complete the unity and fix the attention upon the story."

But instead of dealing in vague generalities we must descend to particulars. And here we would remark, that as art is the natural language of the higher faculties of the mind, and is comprehended by every cultivated intellect, it must conform to certain laws having their foundation in the constitution of the mind itself. Whatever calls into exercise the powers of the mind delights us; and whatever is agreeable to all minds possessed of liberal culture must be the standard of the rules of art. That which is agreeable to a perfect mind is the standard of the laws of art.

The first and most essential of these laws is oneness, or unity. In all works of art there should be nothing superfluous, nothing to break the unity or confuse the identity; there should be one focus of attraction, or rather one radiating point, whence the interest should flow. We observe this in all works of the highest genius; and every cultivated mind admits it, at once, as a rule of art. Horace, whose eyes rested daily upon the captive relics of Grecian art, laid down as a maxim, from his observation of those relics:

Denique sit quidvis, simplex duntaxat et unum."

Another rule of art is truthfulness, or consistency. A child should never be represented as reasoning like a sage; nor should a Juno, or a Venus, be represented as a Hercules, or an Apollo.

This truthfulness is twofold-ideal and historical. By the former we mean there should be no inconsistency of circumstances, nothing impossible in the nature of things as represented. If the painter lays his scenes in fairy-land, there must be nothing incon

sistent with our conceptions of the character and habits of fairies. By the latter is meant, that historical pieces of art should conform, in the great outlines of their character, to the historical characters of the originals.

Another very important rule of art is symmetry, or proportion. Every part should have its due relationship to all the others, and to the whole, and should be made prominent and conspicuous in proportion to its importance. In this particular Grecian art excels all other. Symmetry was a striking characteristic of every thing about the Greek. It was seen in his education, a fundamental principle of which was to educate the body as well as the mind, which was done by gymnastics. The successful result of this physical education was called eueria, good habit. The education of the mind was called mousike, music, indicating that harmony was the grand result at which intellectual education aimed.

The nature of the climate contributed to that nice appreciation of symmetry of form, which so strikingly characterized the Greeks. Their climate was so serene and beautiful that they spent much more time in the open air than more northern nations are able to do. Hence their eyes were more accustomed to dwell upon the external forms of nature in all their rich variety. But the northern nations, more confined to their houses on account of their severer climate, far surpassed them in the depth of their domestic feelings, and in grand, grotesque and wild imaginings.

The principles of art which have been enumerated, were most strictly observed by the Greeks. There are other principles, in the application of which modern artists have surpassed them; but notwithstanding this partial superiority on the part of the moderns, the Greeks will ever retain the supreme excellence in all the higher principles of art, especially as applied to Architecture and Sculpture.

C. E.

ART. VII. — The Late General Assembly. — Church and State.

In referring to the late General Assembly, at Philadelphia, we have in view only its action on the resolutions originally introduced by Dr. Spring; and as they are now so well known to our readers, it may not be necessary to spread them at large on these pages.

The General Assembly of 1861 will be a noted one in the history of the Presbyterian Church in America. No one ever satexcepting perhaps the famous Assembly of '37 — whose action has affected so widely and so profoundly the general posture and power of the Church, as will the action of that of 1861. Time has proved, beyond the possibility of a doubt, the far-sighted wisdom of the venerable men now rapidly passing away to their rest, who abrogated the Plan of Union and adopted the exscinding resolutions; and who afterwards inaugurated a scheme of Church action in perfect accordance with the principles upon which their previous proceedings had been based, and under which the Church has attained so high a degree of efficiency and prosperity. That whole course of procedure was a necessary, righteous, and masterly policy, conservative of purity of doctrine, of presbyterial order in both principle and practice, and of the peace and unity and power of the Church. Calm and thoughtful men, of the three great parties concerned in the discussions and conflicts of the decade that covers the years '37 and '38, have become convinced that the division of the Presbyterian Church at that time, and upon the grounds assigned, and the course subsequently pursued by the Old School, have been promotive in the end of vast good, almost unmingled good, to the cause of truth and its propagation throughout this land and the world. The great practical question clearly evolved and settled and acted upon, was that the Church as such must do her own work the work her risen Lord appointed, and for which he organized her; so that it is the sheerest folly, nay, an impeachment of His wisdom, to suppose she is not abundantly furnished with all the organs and appliances needed to fulfill her beneficent mission. Rescued from entangling alliances with extraneous organizations, or subservi

ency to them, the Church set forward on a new career of high success. She was brought back to the primitive starting point in her practical life. Her subsequent progress has shown how the divine plan exceeds all plans originating in fleshly wisdom, however well intended. Under these plans of carnal wisdom, too, it must be remembered, heresy and the subversion of the Church's polity were introduced.

Great ideas clearly apprehended and reduced to practice soon work out astonishing results: but it is no less true that a line of policy once accepted and long persisted in without question, after a while may modify or even totally change our notions of the very nature of institutions themselves. This has been abundantly manifested again and again. The Presbyterian Church emerged from the exciting controversies alluded to above, thoroughly possessed of the grand idea that as organized-being modeled. after the divine pattern- she was completely equipped for the Master's work. She realized that idea. She sloughed off associations and connections, and modes of thinking and doing, heterogeneous to her real nature and spirit, and took into her own hands the responsibilities divinely imposed on her. It was life from the dead. She awoke to her normal state; and ever since, quietly and healthfully, have her energies been developing on a vast and constantly increasing scale. Her scriptural doctrine and polity have been preserved in their beautiful symmetry; their benignant efficacy has been widely illustrated; and whatever friendly discussions may have obtained among her sons, have been occasioned by an earnest desire to attain the perfect realization of the idea, that she was complete in herself to accomplish the will of her Lord. An experience of almost a quarter of a century attests the truth of what has just been asserted.

All history shows the slowness of large communities in grasping and bringing into practical efficiency, those fundamental principles of things that finally shape and control their destiny. After these principles have been elaborated and wrought into form by the leading minds of an age, a considerable time elapses before they are understood and accepted by the mass of society; and a still longer time before they so pervade and influence the common thought of the organic whole, as to determine the di