The name is absent

Our Debt to Rome, Greece, and Judea 203
our culture and civilization are full of shams and many
of our artistic products lack sincerity and simplicity. Plato
gave us a great saying when he declared that the True, the
Good, and the Beautiful were identical. In my humble
opinion our canned music and potted plays are demoralizing
our characters and dehumanizing our lives. Let me give a
practical illustration. Why should we continue to destroy
the tastes of our children by placing the hideous illustrated
supplements of our papers in their hands? Why not give
them genuine illustrated papers. And if we buy our children
a victrola, is it not just as pleasurable and infinitely more
profitable for them to have classical records than jazzy
airs? Let us try to direct the steps of our children along
the paths of beauty, sincerity, and simplicity. One could say
much of the exaggerations we use in our ordinary speech,
of the excessive use of cosmetics by millions of people, of
the over-indulgence in senseless amusements, of overdress
and overadornment, of the childish overemphasis placed
upon mere population in our growing cities, as if the worth
of a city depended upon the number of noses it contained.
But sufficient has been said to show how a little more of
the Greek spirit would help us in our lives.

And so we learn from the Greeks that sincerity and
simplicity are the warp and the woof of true culture and re-
finement. Shams and artificialities were abhorrent to the
Greek’s sense of simplicity and proportion. When we
think of the Parthenon at Athens we quite naturally asso-
ciate it with absolute architectural perfection. Why? Be-
cause, when the Greeks built the temple their instinct for
precision kept them from making one part of it too large in
proportion to another, or from adding adornment in the
wrong place. For the same reason the South End Junior
High School is the noblest building in Houston. The

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