to teach you sculpture, to tell you how to make yourself master in the
treatment of stone. He will tell you wise things about the plastic
material that you have to mold with thumb and finger, and then about
the use of the chisel and the hammer to produce the result in the
stone, following the treatment of that plastic material. But when you
have learned it all, can you really believe that you will produce the
effect of that majestic manhood that you see in the David of Angelo
in the Piazza of Florence, or that wise, determined progress that is
exprest in Donatello's St. George? What is the difference between your
failure and the results of those men? Genius--life. And when you turn
to the moral law, and when you ask yourself, "How can I learn to
be athirst for God?" the preachers say, "Accept the moral law; act
exactly in distinct duty to your parents; say, 'Corban, it is a gift
by whatsoever thou mayest be profited thereby'; do your duty strictly
to the letter and nothing more; be conservative about your property;
restrain yourself from desire of change; do not stimulate and do not
satisfy your passions beyond what is exactly exprest in the moral
law." But then, if you speak the truth, you say, "And in the end what
am I? Why, after all, most commonplace, and, in truth, most sinful."
What is the difference? This difference: there wants here the touch of
genius; there wants the touch of life divine, grace that illuminates
the moral law; there wants, my friends, the enthusiasm for goodness,
the science of sciences, the art of arts, the delight and the desire
of doing right because it is right, the great and splendid spirit that
belongs to all of us; and yet it is the highest when the thirst of
your soul is real. Certainly it is to know God's guidance in law; but
what is law? It is to grasp that atmosphere of life and reality which
comes out of the moral law to those who seek it in a living person
first--the desire of goodness, the desire, the love, the enthusiasm,
the ambition, cost what it may, of doing right because it is