Anchors of the Soul Author:Philip Henry Wicksteed, Brooke Herford Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. THE GATE BEAUTIFUL. ' At the Gate of the Temple which is called Beautiful' (Ads in. 2.) King Herod did a more significant thing than he knew, when, ... more »in rebuilding the old Jewish Temple, he adorned one of its approaches with such lavish ornamentation that it got the name of the ' Gate Beautiful.' He had no high meaning in it. It was little he cared either for God or Temple. All he thought of was of gratifying the love of show which his Roman education had grafted on his half Bedouin nature. What the Jews thought of it does not appear. Probably the stricter Jews frowned upon it just as the old school believers frowned, when the modern descendants of the Puritans first began to replace the homely meeting-house by the Gothic church. Perhaps, however, they consoled themselves with thinking that it was better for people to go into the Temple by a beautiful gate than not to goin at all; and they were hardly human if, in time, they did not begin to take a certain pride in the gaping admiration of foreign visitors and country pilgrims. Anyway there the porch stood, with its rows of rich Corinthian pillars, glistening with costly marbles and burnished gold. And to the dwellers in Jerusalem it was just the beautiful gate of their temple ; but to the world it has been something more. It has been a suggestive image or parable. The architectural fact has fastened men's thought upon a spiritual fact. The great temple of the universe has a ' gate beautiful.' Beauty is one of the things which open from the visible phenomena of nature to a higher meaning which is invisible. The beautiful is one of the doorways to the higher life. It offers the mind refreshment and rest; it invites the heart to worship; and it leads in to the holy of holies of Communion with God. It is this larger, my...« less