CHAPTER I

Ver.10/04/01*END*

This etext was produced by Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.

CULTURE AND ANARCHY: AN ESSAY IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CRITICISM

1869, FIRST EDITION

MATTHEW ARNOLD

Chapter Notes: I have indicated the author's notes with a superscript

asterisk *, my own substantive notes with a superscript + sign, and

my nonsubstantive notes with a superscript ± symbol.

Pagination: The text following a given page number in brackets marks

the beginning of that page, as in the following example: [22] This is

page twenty-two. [23] This is page twenty-three.

CONTENTS

Preface: iii-lx

I: 1-50 (Sweetness and Light)

II: 51-92 (Doing as One Likes)

III: 93-141 (Barbarians, Philistines, Populace)

IV: 142-166 (Hebraism and Hellenism)

V: 166-197 (Porro Unum est Necessarium)

VI: 197-272 (Our Liberal Practitioners)

*Note: in the first edition, chapters are numbered only, not named.

I have added the third edition's titles for reference.

CULTURE AND ANARCHY (1869, FIRST EDITION)

PREFACE

[iii] My foremost design in writing this Preface is to address a word

of exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In

the essay which follows, the reader will often find Bishop Wilson

quoted. To me and to the members of the Society for Promoting

Christian Knowledge his name and writings are still, no doubt,

familiar; but the world is fast going away from old-fashioned people

of his sort, and I learnt with consternation lately from a brilliant

and distinguished votary of the natural sciences, that he had never

so much as heard of Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to have

invented him. At a moment when the Courts of Law have just taken off

the embargo from the recreative religion furnished on Sundays by my

gifted acquaintance and others, and when St. Martin's Hall [iv] and

the Alhambra will soon be beginning again to resound with their

pulpit-eloquence, it distresses one to think that the new lights

should not only have, in general, a very low opinion of the preachers

of the old religion, but that they should have it without knowing the

best that these preachers can do. And that they are in this case is

owing in part, certainly, to the negligence of the Christian

Knowledge Society. In old times they used to print and spread abroad

Bishop Wilson's Maxims of Piety and Christianity; the copy of this

work which I use is one of their publications, bearing their imprint,

and bound in the well-known brown calf which they made familiar to

our childhood; but the date of my copy is 1812. I know of no copy

besides, and I believe the work is no longer one of those printed and

circulated by the Society. Hence the error, flattering, I own, to me

personally, yet in itself to be regretted, of the distinguished

physicist already mentioned.

But Bishop Wilson's Maxims deserve to be circulated as a religious

book, not only by comparison with the cartloads of rubbish circulated

at present under this designation, but for their own sake, and even

by comparison with the other works of the same [v] author. Over the

far better known Sacra Privata they have this advantage, that they

were prepared by him for his own private use, while the Sacra Privata

were prepared by him for the use of the public. The Maxims were

never meant to be printed, and have on that account, like a work of,

doubtless, far deeper emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus

Aurelius, something peculiarly sincere and first-hand about them.

Some of the best things from the Maxims have passed into the Sacra

Privata; still, in the Maxims, we have them as they first arose; and

whereas, too, in the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as

one of the clergy, and as addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he

almost always speaks solely as a man. I am not saying a word against

the Sacra Privata, for which I have the highest respect; only the

Maxims seem to me a better and a more edifying book still. They

should be read, as Joubert says Nicole should be read, with a direct

aim at practice. The reader will leave on one side things which,

from the change of time and from the changed point of view which the

change of time inevitably brings with it, no longer suit him; enough

[vi] will remain to serve as a sample of the very best, perhaps,

which our nation and race can do in the way of religious writing.

Monsieur Michelet makes it a reproach to us that, in all the doubt as

to the real author of the Imitation, no one has ever dreamed of

ascribing that work to an Englishman. It is true, the Imitation

could not well have been written by an Englishman; the religious

delicacy and the profound asceticism of that admirable book are

hardly in our nature. This would be more of a reproach to us if in

poetry, which requires, no less than religion, a true delicacy of

spiritual perception, our race had not done such great things; and if

the Imitation, exquisite as it is, did not, as I have elsewhere

remarked, belong to a class of works in which the perfect balance of

human nature is lost, and which have therefore, as spiritual

productions, in their contents something excessive and morbid, in

their form something not thoroughly sound. On a lower range than the

Imitation, and awakening in our nature chords less poetical and

delicate, the Maxims of Bishop Wilson are, as a religious work, far

more solid. To the most sincere ardour and unction, Bishop Wilson

unites, in these Maxims, that downright honesty [vii] and plain good

sense which our English race has so powerfully applied to the divine

impossibilities of religion; by which it has brought religion so much

into practical life, and has done its allotted part in promoting upon

earth the kingdom of God. But with ardour and unction religion, as

we all know, may still be fanatical; with honesty and good sense, it

may still be prosaic; and the fruit of honesty and good sense united

with ardour and unction is often only a prosaic religion held

fanatically. Bishop Wilson's excellence lies in a balance of the

four qualities, and in a fulness and perfection of them, which makes

this untoward result impossible; his unction is so perfect, and in

such happy alliance with his good sense, that it becomes tenderness

and fervent charity; his good sense is so perfect and in such happy

alliance with his unction, that it becomes moderation and insight.

While, therefore, the type of religion exhibited in his Maxims is

English, it is yet a type of a far higher kind than is in general

reached by Bishop Wilson's countrymen; and yet, being English, it is

possible and attainable for them. And so I conclude as I began, by

saying that a work of this sort is one which the Society for

Promoting Christian [viii] Knowledge should not suffer to remain out

of print or out of currency.

To pass now to the matters canvassed in the following essay. The

whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help

out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total

perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most

concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world,

and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free

thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow

staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue

in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of

following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of

the following essay. I say again here, what I have said in the pages

which follow, that from the faults and weaknesses of bookmen a notion

of something bookish, pedantic, and futile has got itself more or

less connected with the word culture, and that it is a pity we cannot

use a word more perfectly free from all shadow of reproach. And yet,

futile as are many bookmen, and helpless as books and reading often

prove for bringing nearer to perfection those who [ix] use them, one

must, I think, be struck more and more, the longer one lives, to find

how much, in our present society, a man's life of each day depends

for its solidity and value on whether he reads during that day, and,

far more still, on what he reads during it. More and more he who

examines himself will find the difference it makes to him, at the end

of any given day, whether or no he has pursued his avocations

throughout it without reading at all; and whether or no, having read

something, he has read the newspapers only. This, however, is a

matter for each man's private conscience and experience. If a man

without books or reading, or reading nothing but his letters and the

newspapers, gets nevertheless a fresh and free play of the best

thoughts upon his stock notions and habits, he has got culture. He

has got that for which we prize and recommend culture; he has got

that which at the present moment we seek culture that it may give us.

This inward operation is the very life and essence of culture, as we

conceive it.

Nevertheless, it is not easy so to frame one's discourse concerning

the operation of culture, as to avoid giving frequent occasion to a

misunderstanding whereby the essential inwardness of the [x]

operation is lost sight of. We are supposed, when we criticise by

the help of culture some imperfect doing or other, to have in our eye

some well-known rival plan of doing, which we want to serve and

recommend. Thus, for instance, because I have freely pointed out the

dangers and inconveniences to which our literature is exposed in the

absence of any centre of taste and authority like the French Academy,

it is constantly said that I want to introduce here in England an

institution like the French Academy. I have indeed expressly

declared that I wanted no such thing; but let us notice how it is

just our worship of machinery, and of external doing, which leads to

this charge being brought; and how the inwardness of culture makes us

seize, for watching and cure, the faults to which our want of an

Academy inclines us, and yet prevents us from trusting to an arm of

flesh, as the Puritans say,--from blindly flying to this outward

machinery of an Academy, in order to help ourselves. For the very

same culture and free inward play of thought which shows us how the

Corinthian style, or the whimsies about the One Primeval Language,

are generated and strengthened in the absence of an [xi] Academy,

shows us, too, how little any Academy, such as we should be likely to

get, would cure them. Every one who knows the characteristics of our

national life, and the tendencies so fully discussed in the following

pages, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like. One can

see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it was

already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Bishop of Oxford, Mr.

Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve,--

everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished; and

then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with

this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading

articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly, this is not

what will do us good. The very same faults,--the want of

sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right

reason, the dislike of authority,--which have hindered our having an

Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also

hinder us from making our Academy, if we established it, one which

would really correct them. And culture, which shows us truly the

faults, shows us this also just as truly.

[xii] It is by a like sort of misunderstanding, again, that Mr. Oscar

Browning, one of the assistant-masters at Eton, takes up in the

Quarterly Review the cudgels for Eton, as if I had attacked Eton,

because I have said, in a book about foreign schools, that a man may

well prefer to teach his three or four hours a day without keeping a

boarding-house; and that there are great dangers in cramming little

boys of eight or ten and making them compete for an object of great

value to their parents; and, again, that the manufacture and supply

of school-books, in England, much needs regulation by some competent

authority. Mr. Oscar Browning gives us to understand that at Eton he

and others, with perfect satisfaction to themselves and the public,

combine the functions of teaching and of keeping a boarding-house;

that he knows excellent men (and, indeed, well he may, for a brother

of his own, I am told, is one of the best of them,) engaged in

preparing little boys for competitive examinations, and that the

result, as tested at Eton, gives perfect satisfaction. And as to

school-books he adds, finally, that Dr. William Smith, the learned

and distinguished editor of the Quarterly Review, is, as we all know,

[xiii] the compiler of school-books meritorious and many. This is

what Mr. Oscar Browning gives us to understand in the Quarterly

Review, and it is impossible not to read with pleasure what he says.

For what can give a finer example of that frankness and manly self-

confidence which our great public schools, and none of them so much

as Eton, are supposed to inspire, of that buoyant ease in holding up

one's head, speaking out what is in one's mind, and flinging off all

sheepishness and awkwardness, than to see an Eton assistant-master

offering in fact himself as evidence that to combine boarding-house-

keeping with teaching is a good thing, and his brother as evidence

that to train and race little boys for competitive examinations is a

good thing? Nay, and one sees that this frank-hearted Eton self-

confidence is contagious; for has not Mr. Oscar Browning managed to

fire Dr. William Smith (himself, no doubt, the modestest man alive,

and never trained at Eton) with the same spirit, and made him insert

in his own Review a puff, so to speak, of his own school-books,

declaring that they are (as they are) meritorious and many?

Nevertheless, Mr. Oscar Browning is wrong in [xiv] thinking that I

wished to run down Eton; and his repetition on behalf of Eton, with

this idea in his head, of the strains of his heroic ancestor,

Malvina's Oscar, as they are recorded by the family poet, Ossian, is

unnecessary. "The wild boar rushes over their tombs, but he does not

disturb their repose. They still love the sport of their youth, and

mount the wind with joy." All I meant to say was, that there were

unpleasantnesses in uniting the keeping a boarding-house with

teaching, and dangers in cramming and racing little boys for

competitive examinations, and charlatanism and extravagance in the

manufacture and supply of our school-books. But when Mr. Oscar

Browning tells us that all these have been happily got rid of in his

case, and his brother's case, and Dr. William Smith's case, then I

say that this is just what I wish, and I hope other people will

follow their good example. All I seek is that such blemishes should

not through any negligence, self-love, or want of due self-

examination, be suffered to continue.

Natural, as we have said, the sort of misunderstanding just noticed

is; yet our usefulness depends upon our being able to clear it away,

and to convince [xv] those who mechanically serve some stock notion

or operation, and thereby go astray, that it is not culture's work or

aim to give the victory to some rival fetish, but simply to turn a

free and fresh stream of thought upon the whole matter in question.

In a thing of more immediate interest, just now, than either of the

two we have mentioned, the like misunderstanding prevails; and until

it is dissipated, culture can do no good work in the matter. When we

criticise the present operation of disestablishing the Irish Church,

not by the power of reason and justice, but by the power of the

antipathy of the Protestant Nonconformists, English and Scotch, to

establishments, we are charged with being dreamers of dreams, which

the national will has rudely shattered, for endowing the religious

sects all round; or we are called enemies of the Nonconformists,

blind partisans of the Anglican Establishment. More than a few words

we must give to showing how erroneous are these charges; because if

they were true, we should be actually subverting our own design, and

playing false to that culture which it is our very purpose to

recommend.

Certainly we are no enemies of the Nonconformists; [xvi] for, on the

contrary, what we aim at is their perfection. Culture, which is the

study of perfection, leads us, as we in the following pages have

shown, to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious

perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general

perfection, developing all parts of our society. For if one member

suffer, the other members must suffer with it; and the fewer there

are that follow the true way of salvation the harder that way is to

find. And while the Nonconformists, the successors and

representatives of the Puritans, and like them staunchly walking by

the best light they have, make a large part of what is strongest and

most serious in this nation and therefore attract our respect and

interest, yet all that, in what follows, is said about Hebraism and

Hellenism, has for its main result to show how our Puritans, ancient

and modern, have not enough added to their care for walking staunchly

by the best light they have, a care that that light be not darkness;

how they have developed one side of their humanity at the expense of

all others, and have become incomplete and mutilated men in

consequence. Thus falling short of harmonious [xvii] perfection,

they fail to follow the true way of salvation. Therefore that way is

made the harder for others to find, general perfection is put further

off out of our reach, and the confusion and perplexity in which our

society now labours is increased by the Nonconformists rather than

diminished by them. So while we praise and esteem the zeal of the

Nonconformists in walking staunchly by the best light they have, and

desire to take no whit from it, we seek to add to this what we call

sweetness and light, and develope their full humanity more perfectly;

and to seek this is certainly not to be the enemy of the

Nonconformists.

But now, with these ideas in our head, we come across the present

operation for disestablishing the Irish Church by the power of the

Nonconformists' antipathy to religious establishments and endowments.

And we see Liberal statesmen, for whose purpose this antipathy

happens to be convenient, flattering it all they can; saying that

though they have no intention of laying hands on an Establishment

which is efficient and popular, like the Anglican Establishment here

in England, yet it is in the abstract a fine and good thing that

religion should [xviii] be left to the voluntary support of its

promoters, and should thus gain in energy and independence; and Mr.

Gladstone has no words strong enough to express his admiration of the

refusal of State-aid by the Irish Roman Catholics, who have never yet

been seriously asked to accept it, but who would a good deal

embarrass him if they demanded it. And we see philosophical

politicians, with a turn for swimming with the stream, like Mr.

Baxter or Mr. Charles Buxton, and philosophical divines with the same

turn, like the Dean of Canterbury, seeking to give a sort of grand

stamp of generality and solemnity to this antipathy of the

Nonconformists, and to dress it out as a law of human progress in the

future. Now, nothing can be pleasanter than swimming with the

stream; and we might gladly, if we could, try in our unsystematic way

to help Mr. Baxter, and Mr. Charles Buxton, and the Dean of

Canterbury, in their labours at once philosophical and popular. But

we have got fixed in our minds that a more full and harmonious

development of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most want,

that narrowness, one-sidedness, and incompleteness is what they most

suffer from; [xix] in a word, that in what we call provinciality they

abound, but in what we may call totality they fall short.

And they fall short more than the members of Establishments. The

great works by which, not only in literature, art, and science

generally, but in religion itself, the human spirit has manifested

its approaches to totality, and a full, harmonious perfection, and by

which it stimulates and helps forward the world's general perfection,

come, not from Nonconformists, but from men who either belong to

Establishments or have been trained in them. A Nonconformist

minister, the Rev. Edward White, who has lately written a temperate

and well-reasoned pamphlet against Church Establishments, says that

"the unendowed and unestablished communities of England exert full as

much moral and ennobling influence upon the conduct of statesmen as

that Church which is both established and endowed." That depends upon

what one means by moral and ennobling influence. The believer in

machinery may think that to get a Government to abolish Church-rates

or to legalise marriage with a deceased wife's sister is to exert a

moral and ennobling influence [xx] upon Government. But a lover of

perfection, who looks to inward ripeness for the true springs of

conduct, will surely think that as Shakspeare has done more for the

inward ripeness of our statesmen than Dr. Watts, and has, therefore,

done more to moralise and ennoble them, so an Establishment which has

produced Hooker, Barrow, Butler, has done more to moralise and

ennoble English statesmen and their conduct than communities which

have produced the Nonconformist divines. The fruitful men of English

Puritanism and Nonconformity are men who were trained within the pale

of the Establishment,--Milton, Baxter, Wesley. A generation or two

outside the Establishment, and Puritanism produces men of national

mark no more. With the same doctrine and discipline, men of national

mark are produced in Scotland; but in an Establishment. With the

same doctrine and discipline, men of national and even European mark

are produced in Germany, Switzerland, France; but in Establishments.

Only two religious disciplines seem exempted; or comparatively

exempted, from the operation of the law which seems to forbid the

rearing, outside of national establishments, of men of the [xxi]

highest spiritual significance. These two are the Roman Catholic and

the Jewish. And these, both of them, rest on Establishments, which,

though not indeed national, are cosmopolitan; and perhaps here, what

the individual man does not lose by these conditions of his rearing,

the citizen, and the State of which he is a citizen, loses.

What, now, can be the reason of this undeniable provincialism of the

English Puritans and Protestant Nonconformists, a provincialism which

has two main types,--a bitter type and a smug type,--but which in

both its types is vulgarising, and thwarts the full perfection of our

humanity? Men of genius and character are born and reared in this

medium as in any other. From the faults of the mass such men will

always be comparatively free, and they will always excite our

interest; yet in this medium they seem to have a special difficulty

in breaking through what bounds them, and in developing their

totality. Surely the reason is, that the Nonconformist is not in

contact with the main current of national life, like the member of an

Establishment. In a matter of such deep and vital concern as

religion, this separation from the main current of the national life

has [xxii] peculiar importance. In the following essay we have

discussed at length the tendency in us to Hebraise, as we call it;

that is, to sacrifice all other sides of our being to the religious

side. This tendency has its cause in the divine beauty and grandeur

of religion, and bears affecting testimony to them; but we have seen

that it has dangers for us, we have seen that it leads to a narrow

and twisted growth of our religious side itself, and to a failure in

perfection. But if we tend to Hebraise even in an Establishment,

with the main current of national life flowing round us, and

reminding us in all ways of the variety and fulness of human

existence,--by a Church which is historical as the State itself is

historical, and whose order, ceremonies, and monuments reach, like

those of the State, far beyond any fancies and devisings of ours, and

by institutions such as the Universities, formed to defend and

advance that very culture and many-sided development which it is the

danger of Hebraising to make us neglect,--how much more must we tend

to Hebraise when we lack these preventives. One may say that to be

reared a member of an Establishment is in itself a lesson of

religious moderation, and a help towards [xxiii] culture and

harmonious perfection. Instead of battling for his own private forms

for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable, a man

takes those which have commended themselves most to the religious

life of his nation; and while he may be sure that within those forms

the religious side of his own nature may find its satisfaction, he

has leisure and composure to satisfy other sides of his nature as

well.

But with the member of a Nonconforming or self-made religious

community how different! The sectary's eigene grosse Erfindungen, as

Goethe calls them,--the precious discoveries of himself and his

friends for expressing the inexpressible and defining the undefinable

in peculiar forms of their own, cannot but, as he has voluntarily

chosen them, and is personally responsible for them, fill his whole

mind. He is zealous to do battle for them and affirm them, for in

affirming them he affirms himself, and that is what we all like.

Other sides of his being are thus neglected, because the religious

side, always tending in every serious man to predominance over our

other spiritual sides, is in him made quite absorbing and tyrannous

by [xxiv] the condition of self-assertion and challenge which he has

chosen for himself. And just what is not essential in religion he

comes to mistake for essential, and a thousand times the more readily

because he has chosen it of himself; and religious activity he

fancies to consist in battling for it. All this leaves him little

leisure or inclination for culture; to which, besides, he has no

great institutions not of his own making, like the Universities

connected with the national Establishment, to invite him; but only

such institutions as, like the order and discipline of his religion,

he may have invented for himself, and invented under the sway of the

narrow and tyrannous notions of religion fostered in him as we have

seen. Thus, while a national Establishment of religion favours

totality, hole-and-corner forms of religion (to use an expressive

popular word) inevitably favour provincialism.

But the Nonconformists, and many of our Liberal friends along with

them, have a plausible plan for getting rid of this provincialism,

if, as they can hardly quite deny, it exists. "Let us all be in the

same boat," they cry; "open the Universities to everybody, and let

there be no establishment of [xxv] religion at all!" Open the

Universities by all means; but, as to the second point about

establishment, let us sift the proposal a little. It does seem at

first a little like that proposal of the fox, who had lost his own

tail, to put all the other foxes in the same boat by a general

cutting off of tails; and we know that moralists have decided that

the right course here was, not to adopt this plausible suggestion,

and cut off tails all round, but rather that the other foxes should

keep their tails, and that the fox without a tail should get one.

And so we might be inclined to urge that, to cure the evil of the

Nonconformists' provincialism, the right way can hardly be to

provincialise us all round.

However, perhaps we shall not be provincialised. For the Rev. Edward

White says that probably, "when all good men alike are placed in a

condition of religious equality, and the whole complicated iniquity

of Government Church patronage is swept away, more of moral and

ennobling influence than ever will be brought to bear upon the action

of statesmen." We already have an example of religious equality in

our colonies. "In the colonies," says The Times, "we see religious

communities unfettered by [xxvi] State-control, and the State

relieved from one of the most troublesome and irritating of

responsibilities." But America is the great example alleged by those

who are against establishments for religion. Our topic at this

moment is the influence of religious establishments on culture; and

it is remarkable that Mr. Bright, who has taken lately to

representing himself as, above all, a promoter of reason and of the

simple natural truth of things, and his policy as a fostering of the

growth of intelligence,--just the aims, as is well known, of culture

also,--Mr. Bright, in a speech at Birmingham about education, seized

on the very point which seems to concern our topic, when he said: "I

believe the people of the United States have offered to the world

more valuable information during the last forty years than all Europe

put together." So America, without religious establishments, seems to

get ahead of us all in culture and totality; and these are the cure

for provincialism.

On the other hand, another friend of reason and the simple natural

truth of things, Monsieur Renan, says of America, in a book he has

recently published, what seems to conflict violently with [xxvii]

what Mr. Bright says. Mr. Bright affirms that, not only have the

United States thus informed Europe, but they have done it without a

great apparatus of higher and scientific instruction, and by dint of

all classes in America being "sufficiently educated to be able to

read, and to comprehend, and to think; and that, I maintain, is the

foundation of all subsequent progress." And then comes Monsieur

Renan, and says: "The sound instruction of the people is an effect of

the high culture of certain classes. The countries which, like the

United States, have created a considerable popular instruction

without any serious higher instruction, will long have to expiate

this fault by their intellectual mediocrity, their vulgarity of

manners, their superficial spirit, their lack of general

intelligence."* Now, which of these two friends of culture are we to

believe? Monsieur Renan seems more to have in his eye what we

ourselves mean by culture; [xxviii] because Mr. Bright always has in

his eye what he calls "a commendable interest" in politics and

political agitations. As he said only the other day at Birmingham:

"At this moment,--in fact, I may say at every moment in the history

of a free country,--there is nothing that is so much worth discussing

as politics." And he keeps repeating, with all the powers of his

noble oratory, the old story, how to the thoughtfulness and

intelligence of the people of great towns we owe all our improvements

in the last thirty years, and how these improvements have hitherto

consisted in Parliamentary reform, and free trade, and abolition of

Church rates, and so on; and how they are now about to consist in

getting rid of minority-members, and in introducing a free breakfast-

table, and in abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the

Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments, and much more of the

same kind. And though our pauperism and ignorance, and all the

questions which are called social, seem now to be forcing themselves

upon his mind, yet he still goes on with his glorifying of the great

towns, and the Liberals, and their operations for the last thirty

years. It never [xxix] seems to occur to him that the present

troubled state of our social life has anything to do with the thirty

years' blind worship of their nostrums by himself and our Liberal

friends, or that it throws any doubts upon the sufficiency of this

worship. But he thinks what is still amiss is due to the stupidity

of the Tories, and will be cured by the thoughtfulness and

intelligence of the great towns, and by the Liberals going on

gloriously with their political operations as before; or that it will

cure itself. So we see what Mr. Bright means by thoughtfulness and

intelligence, and in what manner, according to him, we are to grow in

them. And, no doubt, in America all classes read their newspaper and

take a commendable interest in politics more than here or anywhere

else in Europe.

But, in the following essay, we have been led to doubt the

sufficiency of all this political operating of ours, pursued

mechanically as we pursue it; and we found that general intelligence,

as Monsieur Renan calls it, or, in our own words, a reference of all

our operating to a firm intelligible law of things, was just what we

were without, and that we were without it because we worshipped our

machinery [xxx] so devoutly. Therefore, we conclude that Monsieur

Renan, more than Mr. Bright, means by reason and intelligence the

same thing as we do; and when he says that America, that chosen home

of newspapers and politics, is without general intelligence, we think

it likely, from the circumstances of the case, that this is so; and

that, in culture and totality, America, instead of surpassing us all,

falls short.

And,--to keep to our point of the influence of religious

establishments upon culture and a high development of our humanity,--

we can surely see reasons why, with all her energy and fine gifts,

America does not show more of this development, or more promise of

this. In the following essay it will be seen how our society

distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace; and

America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and

the Populace nearly. This leaves the Philistines for the great bulk

of the nation;--a livelier sort of Philistine than ours, and with the

pressure and false ideal of our Barbarians taken away, but left all

the more to himself and to have his full swing! And as we have found

that the strongest and most vital part of English Philistinism was

the [xxxi] Puritan and Hebraising middle-class, and that its

Hebraising keeps it from culture and totality, so it is notorious

that the people of the United States issues from this class, and

reproduces its tendencies,--its narrow conception of man's spiritual

range and of his one thing needful. From Maine to Florida, and back

again, all America Hebraises. Difficult as it is to speak of a

people merely from what one reads, yet that, I think, one may,

without much fear of contradiction say. I mean, when, in the United

States, any spiritual side in a man is wakened to activity, it is

generally the religious side, and the religious side in a narrow way.

Social reformers go to Moses or St. Paul for their doctrines, and

have no notion there is anywhere else to go to; earnest young men at

schools and universities, instead of conceiving salvation as a

harmonious perfection only to be won by unreservedly cultivating many

sides in us, conceive of it in the old Puritan fashion, and fling

themselves ardently upon it in the old, false ways of this fashion,

which we know so well, and such as Mr. Hammond, the American

revivalist, has lately, at Mr. Spurgeon's Tabernacle, been refreshing

our memory with. Now, if America thus [xxxii] Hebraises more than

either England or Germany, will any one deny that the absence of

religious establishments has much to do with it? We have seen how

establishments tend to give us a sense of a historical life of the

human spirit, outside and beyond our own fancies and feelings; how

they thus tend to suggest new sides and sympathies in us to

cultivate; how, further, by saving us from having to invent and fight

for our own forms of religion, they give us leisure and calm to

steady our view of religion itself,--the most overpowering of

objects, as it is the grandest,--and to enlarge our first crude

notions of the one thing needful. But, in a serious people, where

every one has to choose and strive for his own order and discipline

of religion, the contention about these non-essentials occupies his

mind, his first crude notions about the one thing needful do not get

purged, and they invade the whole spiritual man in him, and then,

making a solitude, they call it heavenly peace.

I remember a Nonconformist manufacturer, in a town of the Midland

counties, telling me that when he first came there, some years ago,

the place had no Dissenters; but he had opened an Independent

[xxxiii] chapel in it, and now Church and Dissent were pretty equally

divided, with sharp contests between them. I said, that seemed a

pity. "A pity?" cried he; "not at all! Only think of all the zeal

and activity which the collision calls forth!" "Ah, but, my dear

friend," I answered, "only think of all the nonsense which you now

hold quite firmly, which you would never have held if you had not

been contradicting your adversary in it all these years!" The more

serious the people, and the more prominent the religious side in it,

the greater is the danger of this side, if set to choose out forms

for itself and fight for existence, swelling and spreading till it

swallows all other spiritual sides up, intercepts and absorbs all

nutriment which should have gone to them, and leaves Hebraism rampant

in us and Hellenism stamped out.

Culture, and the harmonious perfection of our whole being, and what

we call totality, then become secondary matters; and the

institutions, which should develope these, take the same narrow and

partial view of humanity and its wants as the free religious

communities take. Just as the free churches of Mr. Beecher or

Brother Noyes, with their provincialism [xxxiv] and want of

centrality, make mere Hebraisers in religion, and not perfect men, so

the university of Mr. Ezra Cornell, a really noble monument of his

munificence, yet seems to rest on a provincial misconception of what

culture truly is, and to be calculated to produce miners, or

engineers, or architects, not sweetness and light.

And, therefore, when the Rev. Edward White asks the same kind of

question about America that he has asked about England, and wants to

know whether, without religious establishments, as much is not done

in America for the higher national life as is done for that life

here, we answer in the same way as we did before, that as much is not

done. Because to enable and stir up people to read their Bible and

the newspapers, and to get a practical knowledge of their business,

does not serve to the higher spiritual life of a nation so much as

culture, truly conceived, serves; and a true conception of culture

is, as Monsieur Renan's words show, just what America fails in.

To the many who think that culture, and sweetness, and light, are all

moonshine, this will not appear to matter much; but with us, who

value [xxxv] them, and who think that we have traced much of our

present discomfort to the want of them, it weighs a great deal. So

not only do we say that the Nonconformists have got provincialism and

lost totality by the want of a religious establishment, but we say

that the very example which they bring forward to help their case

makes against them; and that when they triumphantly show us America

without religious establishments, they only show us a whole nation

touched, amidst all its greatness and promise, with that

provincialism which it is our aim to extirpate in the English

Nonconformists.

But now to evince the disinterestedness which culture, as I have

said, teaches us. We have seen the narrowness generated in

Puritanism by its hole-and-corner organisation, and we propose to

cure it by bringing Puritanism more into contact with the main

current of national life. Here we are fully at one with the Dean of

Westminster; and, indeed, he and we were trained in the same school

to mark the narrowness of Puritanism, and to wish to cure it. But he

and others would give to the present Anglican Establishment a

character the most latitudinarian, as it is called, possible;

availing themselves for this [xxxvi] purpose of the diversity of

tendencies and doctrines which does undoubtedly exist already in the

Anglican formularies; and they would say to the Puritans: "Come all

of you into this liberally conceived Anglican Establishment." But to

say this is hardly, perhaps, to take sufficient account of the course

of history, or of the strength of men's feelings in what concerns

religion, or of the gravity which may have come to attach itself to

points of religious order and discipline merely. When the Rev.

Edward White talks of "sweeping away the whole complicated iniquity

of Government Church patronage," he uses language which has been

forced upon him by his position, but which is, as we have seen,

devoid of any real solidity. But when he talks of the religious

communities "which have for three hundred years contended for the

power of the congregation in the management of their own affairs,"

then he talks history; and his language has behind it, in my opinion,

facts which make the latitudinarianism of our Broad Churchmen quite

illusory. Certainly, culture will never make us think it an

essential of religion whether we have in our Church discipline "a

popular authority of elders," as Hooker calls [xxxvii] it, or whether

we have Episcopal jurisdiction. Certainly, Hooker himself did not

think it an essential; for in the dedication of his Ecclesiastical

Polity, speaking of these questions of Church discipline which gave

occasion to his great work, he says they are "in truth, for the

greatest part, such silly things, that very easiness doth make them

hard to be disputed of in serious manner." Hooker's great work

against the impugners of the order and discipline of the Church of

England was written (and this is too indistinctly seized by many who

read it), not because Episcopalianism is essential, but because its

impugners maintained that Presbyterianism is essential, and that

Episcopalianism is sinful. Neither the one nor the other is either

essential or sinful, and much may be said on behalf of both. But

what is important to be remarked is that both were in the Church of

England at the Reformation, and that Presbyterianism was only

extruded gradually. We have mentioned Hooker, and nothing better

illustrates what has just been asserted than the following incident

in Hooker's own career, which every one has read, for it is related

in Isaac Walton's Life of Hooker, but of which, [xxxviii] probably,

the significance has been fully grasped by not one-half of those who

have read it.

Hooker was through the influence of Archbishop Whitgift appointed, in

1585, Master of the Temple; but a great effort had just been made to

obtain the place for a Mr. Walter Travers, well known in that day,

though now it is Hooker's name which alone preserves his. This

Travers was then afternoon-lecturer at the Temple. The Master whose

death made the vacancy, Alvey, recommended on his deathbed Travers

for his successor, the society was favourable to him, and he had the

support of the Lord Treasurer Burghley. After Hooker's appointment

to the Mastership, Travers remained afternoon-lecturer, and combated

in the afternoons the doctrine which Hooker preached in the mornings.

Now, this Travers, originally a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge,

afterwards afternoon-lecturer at the Temple, recommended for the

Mastership by the foregoing Master, whose opinions, it is said,

agreed with his, favoured by the society of the Temple, and supported

by the Prime Minister,--this Travers was not an Episcopally ordained

clergyman at all; he was a Presbyterian, [xxxix] a partisan of the

Geneva church-discipline, as it was then called, and "had taken

orders," says Walton, "by the Presbyters in Antwerp." In another

place Walton speaks of his orders yet more fully:--"He had

disowned," he says, "the English Established Church and Episcopacy,

and went to Geneva, and afterwards to Antwerp, to be ordained

minister, as he was by Villers and Cartwright and others the heads of

a congregation there; and so came back again more confirmed for the

discipline." Villers and Cartwright are in like manner examples of

Presbyterianism within the Church of England, which was common enough

at that time; but perhaps nothing can better give us a lively sense

of its presence there than this history of Travers, which is as if

Mr. Binney were now afternoon-reader at Lincoln's Inn or the Temple,

were to be a candidate, favoured by the benchers and by the Prime

Minister, for the Mastership, and were only kept out of the post by

the accident of the Archbishop of Canterbury's influence with the

Queen carrying a rival candidate.

Presbyterianism, with its popular principle of the power of the

congregation in the management of [xl] their own affairs, was

extruded from the Church of England, and men like Travers can no

longer appear in her pulpits. Perhaps if a government like that of

Elizabeth, with secular statesmen like the Cecils, and ecclesiastical

statesmen like Whitgift, could have been prolonged, Presbyterianism

might, by a wise mixture of concession and firmness, have been

absorbed in the Establishment. Lord Bolingbroke, on a matter of this

kind a very clear-judging and impartial witness, says, in a work far

too little read, his Remarks on English History:--" The measures

pursued and the temper observed in Queen Elizabeth's time tended to

diminish the religious opposition by a slow, a gentle, and for that

very reason an effectual progression. There was even room to hope

that when the first fire of the Dissenters' zeal was passed,

reasonable terms of union with the Established Church might be

accepted by such of them as were not intoxicated with fanaticism.

These were friends to order, though they disputed about it. If these

friends of Calvin's discipline had been once incorporated with the

Established Church, the remaining sectaries would have been of little

moment, either for numbers or [xli] reputation; and the very means

which were proper to gain these friends, were likewise the most

effectual to hinder the increase of them, and of the other sectaries

in the meantime." The temper and ill judgment of the Stuarts made

shipwreck of all policy of this kind. Yet speaking even of the time

of the Stuarts, but their early time, Clarendon says that if Bishop

Andrewes had succeeded Bancroft at Canterbury, the disaffection of

separatists might have been stayed and healed. This, however, was

not to be; and Presbyterianism, after exercising for some years the

law of the strongest, itself in Charles the Second's reign suffered

under this law, and was finally cast out from the Church of England.

Now the points of church discipline at issue between Presbyterianism

and Episcopalianism are, as has been said, not essential. They might

probably once have been settled in a sense altogether favourable to

Episcopalianism. Hooker may have been right in thinking that there

were in his time circumstances which made it essential that they

should be settled in this sense, though the points in themselves were

not essential. But by the very fact of the settlement not having

then been effected, of the [xlii] breach having gone on and widened,

of the Nonconformists not having been amicably incorporated with the

Establishment but violently cast out from it, the circumstances are

now altogether altered. Isaac Walton, a fervent Churchman, complains

that "the principles of the Nonconformists grew at last to such a

height and were vented so daringly, that, beside the loss of life and

limbs, the Church and State were both forced to use such other

severities as will not admit of an excuse, if it had not been to

prevent confusion and the perilous consequences of it." But those

very severities have of themselves made union on an Episcopalian

footing impossible. Besides, Presbyterianism, the popular authority

of elders, the power of the congregation in the management of their

own affairs, has that warrant given to it by Scripture and by the

proceedings of the early Christian Churches, it is so consonant with

the spirit of Protestantism which made the Reformation and which has

such strength in this country, it is so predominant in the practice

of other reformed churches, it was so strong in the original reformed

Church of England, that one cannot help doubting whether any

settlement which suppressed it could have been really permanent,

[xliii] and whether it would not have kept appearing again and again,

and causing dissension.

Well, then, if culture is the disinterested endeavour after man's

perfection, will it not make us wish to cure the provincialism of the

Nonconformists, not by making Churchmen provincial along with them,

but by letting their popular church discipline, formerly found in the

National Church, and still found in the affections and practice of a

good part of the nation, appear in the National Church once more; and

thus to bring Nonconformists into contact again, as their greater

fathers were, with the main stream of national life? Why should not

a Presbyterian or Congregational Church, based on this considerable

and important, though not essential principle, of the congregation's

power in the church management, be established,--with equal rank for

its chiefs with the chiefs of Episcopacy, and with admissibility of

its ministers, under a revised system of patronage and preferment, to

benefices,--side by side with the Episcopal Church, as the Calvinist

and Lutheran Churches are established side by side in France and

Germany? Such a Congregational Church would unite the main bodies of

Protestants who are now separatists; and [xliv] separation would

cease to be the law of their religious order. Then,--through this

concession on a really considerable point of difference,--that

endless splitting into hole-and-corner churches on quite

inconsiderable points of difference, which must prevail so long as

separatism is the first law of a Nonconformist's religious existence,

would be checked. Culture would then find a place among English

followers of the popular authority of elders, as it has long found it

among the followers of Episcopal jurisdiction; and this we should

gain by merely recognising, regularising, and restoring an element

which appeared once in the reformed National Church, and which is

considerable and national enough to have a sound claim to appear

there still.

So far, then, is culture from making us unjust to the Nonconformists

because it forbids us to worship their fetishes, that it even leads

us to propose to do more for them than they themselves venture to

claim. It leads us, also, to respect what is solid and respectable

in their convictions, while their latitudinarian friends make light

of it. Not that the forms in which the human spirit tries to express

the inexpressible, or the forms by which man tries to [xlv] worship,

have or can have, as has been said, for the follower of perfection,

anything necessary or eternal. If the New Testament and the practice

of the primitive Christians sanctioned the popular form of church

government a thousand times more expressly than they do, if the

Church since Constantine were a thousand times more of a departure

from the scheme of primitive Christianity than it can be shown to be,

that does not at all make, as is supposed by men in bondage to the

letter, the popular form of church government alone and always sacred

and binding, or the work of Constantine a thing to be regretted.

What is alone and always sacred and binding for man is the climbing

towards his total perfection, and the machinery by which he does this

varies in value according as it helps him to do it. The planters of

Christianity had their roots in deep and rich grounds of human life

and achievement, both Jewish and also Greek; and had thus a

comparatively firm and wide basis amidst all the vehement inspiration

of their mighty movement and change. By their strong inspiration

they carried men off the old basis of life and culture, whether

Jewish or Greek, and generations arose [xlvi] who had their roots in

neither world, and were in contact therefore with no full and great

stream of human life. Christianity might have lost herself, if it

had not been for some such change as that of the fourth century, in a

multitude of hole-and-corner churches like the churches of English

Nonconformity after its founders departed; churches without great

men, and without furtherance for the higher life of humanity. At a

critical moment came Constantine, and placed Christianity,--or let us

rather say, placed the human spirit, whose totality was endangered,--

in contact with the main current of human life. And his work was

justified by its fruits, in men like Augustine and Dante, and indeed

in all the great men of Christianity, Catholics or Protestants, ever

since. And one may go beyond this. Monsieur Albert Reville, whose

religious writings are always interesting, says that the conception

which cultivated and philosophical Jews now entertain of Christianity

and its founder, is probably destined to become the conception which

Christians themselves will entertain. Socinians are fond of saying

the same thing about the Socinian conception of Christianity. Even

if this were true, it would still have been [xlvii] better for a man,

through the last eighteen hundred years, to have been a Christian,

and a member of one of the great Christian communions, than to have

been a Jew or a Socinian; because the being in contact with the main

stream of human life is of more moment for a man's total spiritual

growth, and for his bringing to perfection the gifts committed to

him, which is his business on earth, than any speculative opinion

which he may hold or think he holds. Luther,--whom we have called a

Philistine of genius, and who, because he was a Philistine, had a

coarseness and lack of spiritual delicacy which have harmed his

disciples, but who, because he was a genius, had splendid flashes of

spiritual insight,--Luther says admirably in his Commentary on the

Book of Daniel: "A God is simply that whereon the human heart rests

with trust, faith, hope and love. If the resting is right, then the

God too is right; if the resting is wrong, then the God too is

illusory." In other words, the worth of what a man thinks about God

and the objects of religion depends on what the man is; and what the

man is, depends upon his having more or less reached the measure of a

perfect and total man.

[xlviii] All this is true; and yet culture, as we have seen, has more

tenderness for scruples of the Nonconformists than have their Broad

Church friends. That is because culture, disinterestedly trying, in

its aim at perfection, to see things as they really are, sees how

worthy and divine a thing is the religious side in man, though it is

not the whole of man. And when Mr. Greg, who differs from us about

edification, (and certainly we do not seem likely to agree with him

as to what edifies), finding himself moved by some extraneous

considerations or other to take a Church's part against its enemies,

calls taking a Church's part returning to base uses, culture teaches

us how out of place is this language, and that to use it shows an

inadequate conception of human nature, and that no Church will thank

a man for taking its part in this fashion, but will leave him with

indifference to the tender mercies of his Benthamite friends. But

avoiding Benthamism, or an inadequate conception of the religious

side in man, culture makes us also avoid Mialism, or an inadequate

conception of man's totality. Therefore to the worth and grandeur of

the religious side in man, culture is rejoiced and willing to pay any

tribute, [xlix] except the tribute of man's totality. True, the

order and liturgy of the Church of England one may be well contented

to live and to die with, and they are such as to inspire an

affectionate and revering attachment. True, the reproaches of

Nonconformists against this order for "retaining badges of

Antichristian recognisance;" and for "corrupting the right form of

Church polity with manifold Popish rites and ceremonies;" true, their

assertion of the essentialness of their own supposed Scriptural

order, and their belief in its eternal fitness, are founded on

illusion. True, the whole attitude of horror and holy superiority

assumed by Puritanism towards the Church of Rome, is wrong and false,

and well merits Sir Henry Wotton's rebuke:--"Take heed of thinking

that the farther you go from the Church of Rome, the nearer you are

to God." True, one of the best wishes one could form for Mr.

Spurgeon or Father Jackson is, that they might be permitted to learn

on this side the grave (for if they do not, a considerable surprise

is certainly reserved for them on the other) that Whitfield and

Wesley were not at all better than St. Francis, and that they

themselves are not at all better than Lacordaire. Yet, [l] in spite

of all this, so noble and divine a thing is religion, so respectable

is that earnestness which desires a prayer-book with one strain of

doctrine, so attaching is the order and discipline by which we are

used to have our religion conveyed, so many claims on our regard has

that popular form of church government for which Nonconformists

contend, so perfectly compatible is it with all progress towards

perfection, that culture would make us shy even to propose to

Nonconformists the acceptance of the Anglican prayer-book and the

episcopal order; and would be forward to wish them a prayer-book of

their own approving, and the church discipline to which they are

attached and accustomed. Only not at the price of Mialism; that is,

of a doctrine which leaves the Nonconformists in holes and corners,

out of contact with the main current of national life. One can lay

one's finger, indeed, on the line by which this doctrine has grown

up, and see how the essential part of Nonconformity is a popular

church-discipline analogous to that of the other reformed churches,

and how its voluntaryism is an accident. It contended for the

establishment of its own church-discipline as the only true [li] one;

and beaten in this contention, and seeing its rival established, it

came down to the more plausible proposal "to place all good men alike

in a condition of religious equality;" and this plan of proceeding,

originally taken as a mere second-best, became, by long sticking to

it and preaching it up, first fair, then righteous, then the only

righteous, then at last necessary to salvation. This is the plan for

remedying the Nonconformists' divorce from contact with the national

life by divorcing churchmen too from contact with it; that is, as we

have familiarly before put it, the tailless foxes are for cutting off

tails all round. But this the other foxes could not wisely grant,

unless it were proved that tails are of no value. And so, too,

unless it is proved that contact with the main current of national

life is of no value (and we have shown that it is of the greatest

value), we cannot safely, even to please the Nonconformists in a

matter where we would please them as much as possible, admit Mialism.

But now, as we have shown the disinterestedness which culture

enjoins, and its obedience not to likings or dislikings, but to the

aim of perfection, let us show its flexibility,--its independence of

machinery. That [lii] other and greater prophet of intelligence, and

reason, and the simple natural truth of things,--Mr. Bright,--means

by these, as we have seen, a certain set of measures which suit the

special ends of Liberal and Nonconformist partisans. For instance,

reason and justice towards Ireland mean the abolishment of the

iniquitous Protestant ascendency in such a particular way as to suit

the Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments. Reason and justice

pursued in a different way, by distributing among the three main

Churches of Ireland,--the Roman Catholic, the Anglican, and the

Presbyterian,--the church property of Ireland, would immediately

cease, for Mr. Bright and the Nonconformists, to be reason and

justice at all, and would become, as Mr. Spurgeon says, "a setting up

of the Roman image." Thus we see that the sort of intelligence

reached by culture is more disinterested than the sort of

intelligence reached by belonging to the Liberal party in the great

towns, and taking a commendable interest in politics. But still more

striking is the difference between the two views of intelligence,

when we see that culture not only makes a quite disinterested choice

of the machinery [liii] proper to carry us towards sweetness and

light, and to make reason and the will of God prevail, but by even

this machinery does not hold stiffly and blindly, and easily passes

on beyond it to that for the sake of which it chose it.

For instance: culture leads us to think that the ends of human

perfection might be best served by establishing,--that is, by

bringing into contact with the main current of the national life,--in

Ireland the Roman Catholic and the Presbyterian Churches along with

the Anglican Church; and, in England, a Presbyterian or

Congregational Church of like rank and status with our Episcopalian

one. It leads us to think that we should really, in this way, be

working to make reason and the will of God prevail; because we should

be making Roman Catholics better citizens, and Nonconformists,--nay,

and Churchmen along with them,-- larger-minded and more complete

men. But undoubtedly there are great difficulties in such a plan as

this; and the plan is not one which looks very likely to be adopted.

It is a plan more for a time of creative statesmen, like the time of

Elizabeth, than for a time of instrumental [liv] statesmen like the

present. The Churchman must rise above his ordinary self in order to

favour it; and the Nonconformist has worshipped his fetish of

separatism so long that he is likely to wish still to remain, like

Ephraim, "a wild ass alone by himself." The centre of power being

where it is, our instrumental statesmen have every temptation, as is

shown more at large in the following essay, in the first place, to

"relieve themselves," as The Times says, "of troublesome and

irritating responsibilities;" in the second place, when they must

act, to go along, as they do, with the ordinary self of those on

whose favour they depend, to adopt as their own its desires, and to

serve them with fidelity, and even, if possible, with impulsiveness.

This is the more easy for them, because there are not wanting,--and

there never will be wanting,--thinkers like Mr. Baxter, Mr. Charles

Buxton, and the Dean of Canterbury, to swim with the stream, but to

swim with it philosophically; to call the desires of the ordinary

self of any great section of the community edicts of the national

mind and laws of human progress, and to give them a general, a

philosophic, and an imposing expression. A generous statesman may

[lv] honestly, therefore, soon unlearn any disposition to put his

tongue in his cheek in advocating these desires, and may advocate

them with fervour and impulsiveness. Therefore a plan such as that

which we have indicated does not seem a plan so likely to find favour

as a plan for abolishing the Irish Church by the power of the

Nonconformists' antipathy to establishments.

But to tell us that our fond dreams are on that account shattered is

inexact, and is the sort of language which ought to be addressed to

the promoters of intelligence through public meetings and a

commendable interest in politics, when they fail in their designs,

and not to us. For we are fond stickers to no machinery, not even

our own; and we have no doubt that perfection can be reached without

it,--with free churches as with established churches, and with

instrumental statesmen as with creative statesmen. But it can never

be reached without seeing things as they really are; and it is to

this, therefore, and to no machinery in the world, that culture

sticks fondly. It insists that men should not mistake, as they are

prone to mistake, their natural taste for the bathos for a relish for

the sublime; and if statesmen, either [lvi] with their tongue in

their cheek or through a generous impulsiveness, tell them their

natural taste for the bathos is a relish for the sublime, there is

the more need for culture to tell them the contrary. It is delusion

on this point which is fatal, and against delusion on this point

culture works. It is not fatal to our Liberal friends to labour for

free trade, extension of the suffrage, and abolition of church-rates,

instead of graver social ends; but it is fatal to them to be told by

their flatterers, and to believe, with our pauperism increasing more

rapidly than our population, that they have performed a great, an

heroic work, by occupying themselves exclusively, for the last thirty

years, with these Liberal nostrums, and that the right and good

course for them now is to go on occupying themselves with the like

for the future. It is not fatal to Americans to have no religious

establishments and no effective centres of high culture; but it is

fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that

they are the most intelligent people in the whole world, when of

intelligence, in the true and fruitful sense of the word, they even

singularly, as we have seen, come short. It is not [lvii] fatal to

the Nonconformists to remain with their separated churches; but it is

fatal to them to be told by their flatterers, and to believe, that

theirs is the one pure and Christ-ordained way of worshipping God,

that provincialism and loss of totality have not come to them from

following it, or that provincialism and loss of totality are not

evils. It is not fatal to the English nation to abolish the Irish

Church by the power of the Nonconformists' antipathy to

establishments; but it is fatal to it to be told by its flatterers,

and to believe, that it is abolishing it through reason and justice,

when it is really abolishing it through this power; or to expect the

fruits of reason and justice from anything but the spirit of reason

and justice themselves.

Now culture, because of its keen sense of what is really fatal, is

all the more disposed to be pliant and easy about what is not fatal.

And because machinery is the bane of politics, and an inward working,

and not machinery, is what we most want, we keep advising our ardent

young Liberal friends to think less of machinery, to stand more aloof

from the arena of politics at present, and rather to try and promote,

with us, an inward working. They do not listen [lviii] to us, and

they rush into the arena of politics, where their merits, indeed,

seem to be little appreciated as yet; and then they complain of the

reformed constituencies, and call the new Parliament a Philistine

Parliament. As if a nation, nourished and reared in Hebraising,

could give us, just yet, anything better than a Philistine

Parliament!--for would a Barbarian Parliament be even so good, or a

Populace Parliament? For our part, we rejoice to see our dear old

friends, the Hebraising Philistines, gathered in force in the Valley

of Jehoshaphat before their final conversion, which will certainly

come; but for this conversion we must not try to oust them from their

places, and to contend for machinery with them, but we must work on

them inwardly and cure them of Hebraising.

Yet the days of Israel are innumerable; and in its blame of

Hebraising too, and in its praise of Hellenising, culture must not

fail to keep its flexibility, and to give to its judgments that

passing and provisional character which we have seen it impose on its

preferences and rejections of machinery. Now, and for us, it is a

time to Hellenise, and to praise knowing; for we have Hebraised too

much, [lix] and have over-valued doing. But the habits and

discipline received from Hebraism remain for our race an eternal

possession; and, as humanity is constituted, one must never assign

them the second rank to-day, without being ready to restore them to

the first rank to-morrow. To walk staunchly by the best light one

has, to be strict and sincere with oneself, not to be of the number

of those who say and do not, to be in earnest,--this is the

discipline by which alone man is enabled to rescue his life from

thraldom to the passing moment and to his bodily senses, to ennoble

it, and to make it eternal. And this discipline has been nowhere so

effectively taught as in the school of Hebraism. Sophocles and Plato

knew as well as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews that

"without holiness no man shall see God," and their notion of what

goes to make up holiness was larger than his. But the intense and

convinced energy with which the Hebrew, both of the Old and of the

New Testament, threw himself upon his ideal, and which inspired the

incomparable definition of the great Christian virtue, Faith,--the

substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,--this

energy of faith in its ideal has [lx] belonged to Hebraism alone. As

our idea of holiness enlarges, and our scope of perfection widens

beyond the narrow limits to which the over-rigour of Hebraising has

tended to confine it, we shall come again to Hebraism for that devout

energy in embracing our ideal, which alone can give to man the

happiness of doing what he knows. "If ye know these things, happy

are ye if ye do them!"--the last word for infirm humanity will always

be that. For this word, reiterated with a power now sublime, now

affecting, but always admirable, our race will, as long as the world

lasts, return to Hebraism; and the Bible, which preaches this word,

will forever remain, as Goethe called it, not only a national book,

but the Book of the Nations. Again and again, after what seemed

breaches and separations, the prophetic promise to Jerusalem will

still be true:--Lo, thy sons come, whom thou sentest away; they come

gathered from the west unto the east by the word of the Holy One,

rejoicing in the remembrance of God.

NOTES

xxvii. *"Les pays qui comme les États-Unis ont créé un enseignement

populaire considérable sans instruction supérieure sérieuse,

expieront longtemps encore leur faute par leur médiocrité

intellectuelle, leur grossièreté de moeurs, leur esprit superficiel,

leur manque d'intelligence générale."

[PREAMBLE] CULTURE AND ANARCHY

[1] In one of his speeches a year or two ago, that fine speaker and

famous Liberal, Mr. Bright, took occasion to have a fling at the

friends and preachers of culture. "People who talk about what they

call culture!" said he contemptuously; "by which they mean a

smattering of the two dead languages of Greek and Latin." And he

went on to remark, in a strain with which modern speakers and writers

have made us very familiar, how poor a thing this culture is, how

little good it can do to the world, and how absurd it is for its

possessors to set much [2] store by it. And the other day a younger

Liberal than Mr. Bright, one of a school whose mission it is to bring

into order and system that body of truth of which the earlier

Liberals merely touched the outside, a member of the University of

Oxford, and a very clever writer, Mr. Frederic Harrison, developed,

in the systematic and stringent manner of his school, the thesis

which Mr. Bright had propounded in only general terms. "Perhaps the

very silliest cant of the day," said Mr. Frederic Harrison, "is the

cant about culture. Culture is a desirable quality in a critic of

new books, and sits well on a possessor of belles lettres; but as

applied to politics, it means simply a turn for small fault-finding,

love of selfish ease, and indecision in action. The man of culture

is in politics one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry

and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too

unreal, no end is too unpractical for him. But the active exercise

of politics requires common sense, sympathy, trust, resolution and

enthusiasm, qualities which your man of culture has carefully rooted

up, lest they damage the delicacy of his critical olfactories.

Perhaps they are the only class [3] of responsible beings in the

community who cannot with safety be entrusted with power."

Now for my part I do not wish to see men of culture asking to be

entrusted with power; and, indeed, I have freely said, that in my

opinion the speech most proper, at present, for a man of culture to

make to a body of his fellow-countrymen who get him into a committee-

room, is Socrates's: Know thyself! and this is not a speech to be

made by men wanting to be entrusted with power. For this very

indifference to direct political action I have been taken to task by

the Daily Telegraph, coupled, by a strange perversity of fate, with

just that very one of the Hebrew prophets whose style I admire the

least, and called "an elegant Jeremiah." It is because I say (to use

the words which the Daily Telegraph puts in my mouth):--"You mustn't

make a fuss because you have no vote,--that is vulgarity; you mustn't

hold big meetings to agitate for reform bills and to repeal corn

laws,--that is the very height of vulgarity,"--it is for this reason

that I am called, sometimes an elegant Jeremiah, sometimes a spurious

Jeremiah, a Jeremiah about the reality of whose mission the writer in

the Daily [4] Telegraph has his doubts. It is evident, therefore,

that I have so taken my line as not to be exposed to the whole brunt

of Mr. Frederic Harrison's censure. Still, I have often spoken in

praise of culture; I have striven to make all my works and ways serve

the interests of culture; I take culture to be something a great deal

more than what Mr. Frederic Harrison and others call it: "a desirable

quality in a critic of new books." Nay, even though to a certain

extent I am disposed to agree with Mr. Frederic Harrison, that men of

culture are just the class of responsible beings in this community of

ours who cannot properly, at present, be entrusted with power, I am

not sure that I do not think this the fault of our community rather

than of the men of culture. In short, although, like Mr. Bright and

Mr. Frederic Harrison, and the editor of the Daily Telegraph, and a

large body of valued friends of mine, I am a liberal, yet I am a

liberal tempered by experience, reflection, and renouncement, and I

am, above all, a believer in culture. Therefore I propose now to try

and enquire, in the simple unsystematic way which best suits both my

taste and my powers, what culture really is, what good it [5] can do,

what is our own special need of it; and I shall seek to find some

plain grounds on which a faith in culture--both my own faith in it

and the faith of others,--may rest securely.

CHAPTER I

[5] The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes,

indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The

culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek

and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual

as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance,

or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its

holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it.

No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it, as

culture, at all. To find the real ground for the very differing

estimate which serious people will set upon culture, we must find

some motive for culture in the terms of which [6] may lie a real

ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us. I have

before now pointed out that in English we do not, like the

foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense;

with us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense; a

liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be

meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the

word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying

activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an

estimate of the celebrated French critic, Monsieur Sainte-Beuve, and

a very inadequate estimate it, in my judgment, was. And its

inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way it left

out of sight the double sense really involved in the word curiosity,

thinking enough was said to stamp Monsieur Sainte-Beuve with blame if

it was said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by

curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that Monsieur Sainte-Beuve

himself, and many other people with him, would consider that this was

praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really

to be accounted worthy of blame [7] and not of praise. For as there

is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely

a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity,--a desire after the

things of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of

seeing them as they are,--which is, in an intelligent being, natural

and laudable. Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are

implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained

without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind

and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we

blame curiosity. Montesquieu says:--"The first motive which ought to

impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our

nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent."

This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion,

however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this

passion; and it is a worthy ground, even though we let the term

curiosity stand to describe it.

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the

scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are,

natural and proper in an intelligent [8] being, appears as the ground

of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbour, the

impulses towards action, help, and beneficence, the desire for

stopping human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing the

sum of human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better

and happier than we found it,--motives eminently such as are called

social,--come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and

pre-eminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having

its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of

perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not

merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but

also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As, in the

first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words:

"To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the

second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than

these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God

prevail!" Only, whereas the passion for doing good is apt to be

overhasty in determining what reason and the will of God say, because

its turn is for acting rather than thinking, and it wants to be [9]

beginning to act; and whereas it is apt to take its own conceptions,

which proceed from its own state of development and share in all the

imperfections and immaturities of this, for a basis of action; what

distinguishes culture is, that it is possessed by the scientific

passion, as well as by the passion of doing good; that it has worthy

notions of reason and the will of God, and does not readily suffer

its own crude conceptions to substitute themselves for them; and

that, knowing that no action or institution can be salutary and

stable which are not based on reason and the will of God, it is not

so bent on acting and instituting, even with the great aim of

diminishing human error and misery ever before its thoughts, but that

it can remember that acting and instituting are of little use, unless

we know how and what we ought to act and to institute.

This culture is more interesting and more far-reaching than that

other, which is founded solely on the scientific passion for knowing.

But it needs times of faith and ardour, times when the intellectual

horizon is opening and widening all round us, to flourish in. And is

not the close and bounded intellectual horizon within which we have

long lived [10] and moved now lifting up, and are not new lights

finding free passage to shine in upon us? For a long time there was

no passage for them to make their way in upon us, and then it was of

no use to think of adapting the world's action to them. Where was

the hope of making reason and the will of God prevail among people

who had a routine which they had christened reason and the will of

God, in which they were inextricably bound, and beyond which they had

no power of looking? But now the iron force of adhesion to the old

routine,--social, political, religious,--has wonderfully yielded;

the iron force of exclusion of all which is new has wonderfully

yielded; the danger now is, not that people should obstinately refuse

to allow anything but their old routine to pass for reason and the

will of God, but either that they should allow some novelty or other

to pass for these too easily, or else that they should underrate the

importance of them altogether, and think it enough to follow action

for its own sake, without troubling themselves to make reason and the

will of God prevail therein. Now, then, is the moment for culture to

be of service, culture which believes in making reason and the [11]

will of God prevail, believes in perfection, is the study and pursuit

of perfection, and is no longer debarred, by a rigid invincible

exclusion of whatever is new, from getting acceptance for its ideas,

simply because they are new.

The moment this view of culture is seized, the moment it is regarded

not solely as the endeavour to see things as they are, to draw

towards a knowledge of the universal order which seems to be intended

and aimed at in the world, and which it is a man's happiness to go

along with or his misery to go counter to,--to learn, in short, the

will of God,--the moment, I say, culture is considered not merely as

the endeavour to see and learn this, but as the endeavour, also, to

make it prevail, the moral, social, and beneficent character of

culture becomes manifest. The mere endeavour to see and learn it for

our own personal satisfaction is indeed a commencement for making it

prevail, a preparing the way for this, which always serves this, and

is wrongly, therefore, stamped with blame absolutely in itself, and

not only in its caricature and degeneration. But perhaps it has got

stamped with blame, and disparaged with the dubious title of

curiosity, because [12] in comparison with this wider endeavour of

such great and plain utility it looks selfish, petty, and

unprofitable.

And religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which

the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself,--

religion, that voice of the deepest human experience,--does not only

enjoin and sanction the aim which is the great aim of culture, the

aim of setting ourselves to ascertain what perfection is and to make

it prevail; but also, in determining generally in what human

perfection consists, religion comes to a conclusion identical with

that which culture,--seeking the determination of this question

through all the voices of human experience which have been heard upon

it, art, science, poetry, philosophy, history, as well as religion,

in order to give a greater fulness and certainty to its solution,--

likewise reaches. Religion says: The kingdom of God is within you;

and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal

condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as

distinguished from our animality, in the ever-increasing

efficaciousness and in the general harmonious expansion [13] of those

gifts of thought and feeling which make the peculiar dignity, wealth,

and happiness of human nature. As I have said on a former occasion:

"It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless

expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that

the spirit of the human race finds its ideal. To reach this ideal,

culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of

culture." Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming,

is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; and here,

too, it coincides with religion. And because men are all members of

one great whole, and the sympathy which is in human nature will not

allow one member to be indifferent to the rest, or to have a perfect

welfare independent of the rest, the expansion of our humanity, to

suit the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general

expansion. Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible

while the individual remains isolated: the individual is obliged,

under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if

he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards

perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge [14] and

increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward; and

here, once more, it lays on us the same obligation as religion, which

says, as Bishop Wilson has admirably put it, that "to promote the

kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one's own happiness."

Finally, perfection,--as culture, from a thorough disinterested study

of human nature and human experience, learns to conceive it,--is an

harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and

worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the over-

development of any one power at the expense of the rest. Here it

goes beyond religion, as religion is generally conceived by us.

If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious

perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in

becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward

condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of

circumstances,--it is clear that culture, instead of being the

frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright, and Mr. Frederic

Harrison, and many other liberals are apt to call it, has a very

important function to fulfil for mankind. And this function is

particularly [15] important in our modern world, of which the whole

civilisation is, to a much greater degree than the civilisation of

Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to

become more so. But above all in our own country has culture a

weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical character,

which civilisation tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most

eminent degree. Indeed nearly all the characters of perfection, as

culture teaches us to fix them, meet in this country with some

powerful tendency which thwarts them and sets them at defiance. The

idea of perfection as an inward condition of the mind and spirit is

at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem

with us, and nowhere, as I have said, so much in esteem as with us.

The idea of perfection as a general expansion of the human family is

at variance with our strong individualism, our hatred of all limits

to the unrestrained swing of the individual's personality, our maxim

of "every man for himself." The idea of perfection as an harmonious

expansion of human nature is at variance with our want of

flexibility, with our inaptitude for seeing more than one side of a

thing, with our intense [16] energetic absorption in the particular

pursuit we happen to be following. So culture has a rough task to

achieve in this country, and its preachers have, and are likely long

to have, a hard time of it, and they will much oftener be regarded,

for a great while to come, as elegant or spurious Jeremiahs, than as

friends and benefactors. That, however, will not prevent their doing

in the end good service if they persevere; and meanwhile, the mode of

action they have to pursue, and the sort of habits they must fight

against, should be made quite clear to every one who may be willing

to look at the matter attentively and dispassionately.

Faith in machinery is, I said, our besetting danger; often in

machinery most absurdly disproportioned to the end which this

machinery, if it is to do any good at all, is to serve; but always in

machinery, as if it had a value in and for itself. What is freedom

but machinery? what is population but machinery? what is coal but

machinery? what are railroads but machinery? what is wealth but

machinery? what are religious organisations but machinery? Now

almost every voice in England is accustomed to speak of these things

as if they [17] were precious ends in themselves, and therefore had

some of the characters of perfection indisputably joined to them. I

have once before noticed Mr. Roebuck's stock argument for proving the

greatness and happiness of England as she is, and for quite stopping

the mouths of all gainsayers. Mr. Roebuck is never weary of

reiterating this argument of his, so I do not know why I should be

weary of noticing it. "May not every man in England say what he

likes?"--Mr. Roebuck perpetually asks; and that, he thinks, is quite

sufficient, and when every man may say what he likes, our aspirations

ought to be satisfied. But the aspirations of culture, which is the

study of perfection, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when

they may say what they like, is worth saying,--has good in it, and

more good than bad. In the same way The Times, replying to some

foreign strictures on the dress, looks, and behaviour of the English

abroad, urges that the English ideal is that every one should be free

to do and to look just as he likes. But culture indefatigably tries,

not to make what each raw person may like, the rule by which he

fashions himself; but to draw ever nearer to a sense of what is

indeed [18] beautiful, graceful, and becoming, and to get the raw

person to like that. And in the same way with respect to railroads

and coal. Every one must have observed the strange language current

during the late discussions as to the possible failure of our

supplies of coal. Our coal, thousands of people were saying, is the

real basis of our national greatness; if our coal runs short, there

is an end of the greatness of England. But what is greatness?--

culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual condition worthy to

excite love, interest, and admiration; and the outward proof of

possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest, and

admiration. If England were swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which

of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love,

interest, and admiration of mankind,--would most, therefore, show the

evidences of having possessed greatness,--the England of the last

twenty years, or the England of Elizabeth, of a time of splendid

spiritual effort, but when our coal, and our industrial operations

depending on coal, were very little developed? Well then, what an

unsound habit of mind it must be which makes us talk of things like

coal or iron as constituting [19] the greatness of England, and how

salutary a friend is culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and

thus dissipating delusions of this kind and fixing standards of

perfection that are real!

Wealth, again, that end to which our prodigious works for material

advantage are directed,--the commonest of commonplaces tells us how

men are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself; and

certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are

in England at the present time. Never did people believe anything

more firmly, than nine Englishmen out of ten at the present day

believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so

very rich. Now, the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of

its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but

machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard

wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is

so. If it were not for this purging effect wrought upon our minds by

culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would

inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most

that our greatness and welfare [20] are proved by our being very

rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich,

are just the very people whom we call the Philistines. Culture says:

"Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their

manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively;

observe the literature they read, the things which give them

pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the

thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of

wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just

like these people by having it?" And thus culture begets a

dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible value in stemming

the common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and industrial

community, and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being

vulgarised, even if it cannot save the present.

Population, again, and bodily health and vigour, are things which are

nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading, exaggerated way

as in England. Both are really machinery; yet how many people all

around us do we see rest in them and fail to look beyond them! Why,

I have heard [21] people, fresh from reading certain articles of The

Times on the Registrar-General's returns of marriages and births in

this country, who would talk of large families in quite a solemn

strain, as if they had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and

meritorious in them; as if the British Philistine would have only to

present himself before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in

order to be received among the sheep as a matter of right! But

bodily health and vigour, it may be said, are not to be classed with

wealth and population as mere machinery; they have a more real and

essential value. True; but only as they are more intimately

connected with a perfect spiritual condition than wealth or

population are. The moment we disjoin them from the idea of a

perfect spiritual condition, and pursue them, as we do pursue them,

for their own sake and as ends in themselves, our worship of them

becomes as mere worship of machinery, as our worship of wealth or

population, and as unintelligent and vulgarising a worship as that

is. Every one with anything like an adequate idea of human

perfection has distinctly marked this subordination to higher and

spiritual ends of the cultivation of bodily vigour and activity.

[22] "Bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness is profitable

unto all things," says the author of the Epistle to Timothy. And the

utilitarian Franklin says just as explicitly:--"Eat and drink such an

exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to

the services of the mind." But the point of view of culture, keeping

the mark of human perfection simply and broadly in view, and not

assigning to this perfection, as religion or utilitarianism assign to

it, a special and limited character,--this point of view, I say, of

culture is best given by these words of Epictetus:--"It is a sign of

aphuia"+ says he,--that is, of a nature not finely tempered,--"to

give yourselves up to things which relate to the body; to make, for

instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a

great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss

about riding. All these things ought to be done merely by the way:

the formation of the spirit and character must be our real concern."

This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek words aphuia, euphuia,+ a

finely tempered nature, a coarsely tempered nature, give exactly the

notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive of it: a

perfection in which the [23] characters of beauty and intelligence

are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things,"--as

Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too

little, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books,--"the two

noblest of things, sweetness and light." The euphyês+ is the man who

tends towards sweetness and light; the aphyês+ is precisely our

Philistine. The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due

to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the

essential character of human perfection; and Mr. Bright's

misconception of culture, as a smattering of Greek and Latin, conies

itself, after all, from this wonderful significance of the Greeks

having affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself

a kind of homage to it.

It is by thus making sweetness and light to be characters of

perfection, that culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one

law with poetry. I have called religion a more important

manifestation of human nature than poetry, because it has worked on a

broader scale for perfection, and with greater masses of men. But

the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides,

which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea,

though it [24] has not yet had the success that the idea of

conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a human nature

perfect on the moral side, which is the dominant idea of religion,

has been enabled to have; and it is destined, adding to itself the

religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern the other.

The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion and poetry

are one, in which the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on

all sides adds to itself a religious and devout energy, and works in

the strength of that, is on this account of such surpassing interest

and instructiveness for us, though it was,--as, having regard to the

human race in general, and, indeed, having regard to the Greeks

themselves, we must own,--a premature attempt, an attempt which for

success needed the moral and religious fibre in humanity to be more

braced and developed than it had yet been. But Greece did not err in

having the idea of beauty, harmony, and complete human perfection, so

present and paramount; it is impossible to have this idea too present

and paramount; only the moral fibre must be braced too. And we,

because we have braced the moral fibre, are not on that account in

the right way, if at the same [25] time the idea of beauty, harmony,

and complete human perfection, is wanting or misapprehended amongst

us; and evidently it is wanting or misapprehended at present. And

when we rely as we do on our religious organisations, which in

themselves do not and cannot give us this idea, and think we have

done enough if we make them spread and prevail, then, I say, we fall

into our common fault of overvaluing machinery.

Nothing is more common than for people to confound the inward peace

and satisfaction which follows the subduing of the obvious faults of

our animality with what I may call absolute inward peace and

satisfaction,--the peace and satisfaction which are reached as we

draw near to complete spiritual perfection, and not merely to moral

perfection, or rather to relative moral perfection. No people in the

world have done more and struggled more to attain this relative moral

perfection than our English race has; for no people in the world has

the command to resist the Devil, to overcome the Wicked One, in the

nearest and most obvious sense of those words, had such a pressing

force and reality. And we have had our reward, not only in the great

worldly prosperity which our obedience to this [26] command has

brought us, but also, and far more, in great inward peace and

satisfaction. But to me few things are more pathetic than to see

people, on the strength of the inward peace and satisfaction which

their rudimentary efforts towards perfection have brought them, use,

concerning their incomplete perfection and the religious

organisations within which they have found it, language which

properly applies only to complete perfection, and is a far-off echo

of the human soul's prophecy of it. Religion itself, I need hardly

say, supplies in abundance this grand language, which is really the

severest criticism of such an incomplete perfection as alone we have

yet reached through our religious organisations.

The impulse of the English race towards moral development and self-

conquest has nowhere so powerfully manifested itself as in

Puritanism; nowhere has Puritanism found so adequate an expression as

in the religious organisation of the Independents. The modern

Independents have a newspaper, the Nonconformist, written with great

sincerity and ability. The motto, the standard, the profession of

faith which this organ of theirs carries aloft, is: "The Dissidence

of Dissent and the [27] Protestantism of the Protestant religion."

There is sweetness and light, and an ideal of complete harmonious

human perfection! One need not go to culture and poetry to find

language to judge it. Religion, with its instinct for perfection,

supplies language to judge it: "Finally, be of one mind, united in

feeling," says St. Peter. There is an ideal which judges the Puritan

ideal,--"The Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the

Protestant religion!" And religious organisations like this are what

people believe in, rest in, would give their lives for! Such, I say,

is the wonderful virtue of even the beginnings of perfection, of

having conquered even the plain faults of our animality, that the

religious organisation which has helped us to do it can seem to us

something precious, salutary, and to be propagated, even when it

wears such a brand of imperfection on its forehead as this. And men

have got such a habit of giving to the language of religion a special

application, of making it a mere jargon, that for the condemnation

which religion itself passes on the shortcomings of their religious

organisations they have no ear; they are sure to cheat themselves and

to explain this condemnation [28] away. They can only be reached by

the criticism which culture, like poetry, speaking a language not to

be sophisticated, and resolutely testing these organisations by the

ideal of a human perfection complete on all sides, applies to them.

But men of culture and poetry, it will be said, are again and again

failing, and failing conspicuously, in the necessary first stage to

perfection, in the subduing of the great obvious faults of our

animality, which it is the glory of these religious organisations to

have helped us to subdue. True, they do often so fail: they have

often been without the virtues as well as the faults of the Puritan;

it has been one of their dangers that they so felt the Puritan's

faults that they too much neglected the practice of his virtues. I

will not, however, exculpate them at the Puritan's expense; they have

often failed in morality, and morality is indispensable; they have

been punished for their failure, as the Puritan has been rewarded for

his performance. They have been punished wherein they erred; but

their ideal of beauty and sweetness and light, and a human nature

complete on all its sides, remains the true ideal of perfection

still; just as the Puritan's ideal [29] of perfection remains narrow

and inadequate, although for what he did well he has been richly

rewarded. Notwithstanding the mighty results of the Pilgrim Fathers'

voyage, they and their standard of perfection are rightly judged when

we figure to ourselves Shakspeare or Virgil,--souls in whom sweetness

and light, and all that in human nature is most humane, were

eminent,--accompanying them on their voyage, and think what

intolerable company Shakspeare and Virgil would have found them! In

the same way let us judge the religious organisations which we see

all around us. Do not let us deny the good and the happiness which

they have accomplished; but do not let us fail to see clearly that

their idea of human perfection is narrow and inadequate, and that the

Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant

religion will never bring humanity to its true goal. As I said with

regard to wealth,--let us look at the life of those who live in and

for it;--so I say with regard to the religious organisations. Look

at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the Nonconformist;--a life

of jealousy of the Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings of

chapels, sermons; and then think of it [30] as an ideal of a human

life completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs

after sweetness, light, and perfection!

Another newspaper, representing, like the Nonconformist, one of the

religious organisations of this country, was a short time ago giving

an account of the crowd at Epsom on the Derby day, and of all the

vice and hideousness which was to be seen in that crowd; and then the

writer turned suddenly round upon Professor Huxley, and asked him how

he proposed to cure all this vice and hideousness without religion.

I confess I felt disposed to ask the asker this question: And how do

you propose to cure it with such a religion as yours? How is the

ideal of a life so unlovely, so unattractive, so narrow, so far

removed from a true and satisfying ideal of human perfection, as is

the life of your religious organisation as you yourself image it, to

conquer and transform all this vice and hideousness? Indeed, the

strongest plea for the study of perfection as pursued by culture, the

clearest proof of the actual inadequacy of the idea of perfection

held by the religious organisations,--expressing, as I have said, the

most wide-spread effort which the human [31] race has yet made after

perfection,--is to be found in the state of our life and society with

these in possession of it, and having been in possession of it I know

not how many hundred years. We are all of us included in some

religious organisation or other; we all call ourselves, in the

sublime and aspiring language of religion which I have before

noticed, children of God. Children of God;--it is an immense

pretension!--and how are we to justify it? By the works which we do,

and the words which we speak. And the work which we collective

children of God do, our grand centre of life, our city which we have

builded for us to dwell in, is London! London, with its unutterable

external hideousness, and with its internal canker of public

egestas, privatim opulentia,+--to use the words which Sallust puts

into Cato's mouth about Rome,--unequalled in the world! The word,

again, which we children of God speak, the voice which most hits our

collective thought, the newspaper with the largest circulation in

England, nay, with the largest circulation in the whole world, is the

Daily Telegraph! I say that when our religious organisations,--which

I admit to express the most considerable effort after perfection [32]

that our race has yet made,--land us in no better result than this,

it is high time to examine carefully their idea of perfection, to see

whether it does not leave out of account sides and forces of human

nature which we might turn to great use; whether it would not be more

operative if it were more complete. And I say that the English

reliance on our religious organisations and on their ideas of human

perfection just as they stand, is like our reliance on freedom, on

muscular Christianity, on population, on coal, on wealth,--mere

belief in machinery, and unfruitful; and that it is wholesomely

counteracted by culture, bent on seeing things as they are, and on

drawing the human race onwards to a more complete perfection.

Culture, however, shows its single-minded love of perfection, its

desire simply to make reason and the will of God prevail, its freedom

from fanaticism, by its attitude towards all this machinery, even

while it insists that it is machinery. Fanatics, seeing the mischief

men do themselves by their blind belief in some machinery or other,--

whether it is wealth and industrialism, or whether it is the

cultivation of bodily strength and activity, or whether it is a [33]

political organisation, or whether it is a religious organisation,--

oppose with might and main the tendency to this or that political and

religious organisation, or to games and athletic exercises, or to

wealth and industrialism, and try violently to stop it. But the

flexibility which sweetness and light give, and which is one of the

rewards of culture pursued in good faith, enables a man to see that a

tendency may be necessary, and even, as a preparation for something

in the future, salutary, and yet that the generations or individuals

who obey this tendency are sacrificed to it, that they fall short of

the hope of perfection by following it; and that its mischiefs are to

be criticised, lest it should take too firm a hold and last after it

has served its purpose. Mr. Gladstone well pointed out, in a speech

at Paris,--and others have pointed out the same thing,--how necessary

is the present great movement towards wealth and industrialism, in

order to lay broad foundations of material well-being for the society

of the future. The worst of these justifications is, that they are

generally addressed to the very people engaged, body and soul, in the

movement in question; at all events, that they are always seized with

[34] the greatest avidity by these people, and taken by them as quite

justifying their life; and that thus they tend to harden them in

their sins. Now, culture admits the necessity of the movement

towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism, readily allows

that the future may derive benefit from it; but insists, at the same

time, that the passing generations of industrialists,--forming, for

the most part, the stout main body of Philistinism,--are sacrificed

to it. In the same way, the result of all the games and sports which

occupy the passing generation of boys and young men may be the

establishment of a better and sounder physical type for the future to

work with. Culture does not set itself against the games and sports;

it congratulates the future, and hopes it will make a good use of its

improved physical basis; but it points out that our passing

generation of boys and young men is, meantime, sacrificed.

Puritanism was necessary to develop the moral fibre of the English

race, Nonconformity to break the yoke of ecclesiastical domination

over men's minds and to prepare the way for freedom of thought in the

distant future; still, culture points out that the harmonious

perfection of generations of [35] Puritans and Nonconformists have

been, in consequence, sacrificed. Freedom of speech is necessary for

the society of the future, but the young lions of the Daily Telegraph

in the meanwhile are sacrificed. A voice for every man in his

country's government is necessary for the society of the future, but

meanwhile Mr. Beales and Mr. Bradlaugh are sacrificed.

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily

paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the

modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and

sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one

truth:--the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters

of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in

the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that this our

sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness

and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many

beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements.

And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and

has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not won our

political battles, we have not carried our [36] main points, we have

not stopped our adversaries' advance, we have not marched

victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon

the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which

sap our adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up

our own communications with the future. Look at the course of the

great movement which shook Oxford to its centre some thirty years

ago! It was directed, as any one who reads Dr. Newman's Apology may

see, against what in one word maybe called "liberalism." Liberalism

prevailed; it was the appointed force to do the work of the hour; it

was necessary, it was inevitable that it should prevail. The Oxford

movement was broken, it failed; our wrecks are scattered on every

shore:--

Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?+

But what was it, this liberalism, as Dr. Newman saw it, and as it

really broke the Oxford movement? It was the great middle-class

liberalism, which had for the cardinal points of its belief the

Reform Bill of 1832, and local self-government, in politics; in the

social sphere, free-trade, unrestricted competition, [37] and the

making of large industrial fortunes; in the religious sphere, the

Dissidence of Dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant

religion. I do not say that other and more intelligent forces than

this were not opposed to the Oxford movement: but this was the force

which really beat it; this was the force which Dr. Newman felt

himself fighting with; this was the force which till only the other

day seemed to be the paramount force in this country, and to be in

possession of the future; this was the force whose achievements fill

Mr. Lowe with such inexpressible admiration, and whose rule he was so

horror-struck to see threatened. And where is this great force of

Philistinism now? It is thrust into the second rank, it is become a

power of yesterday, it has lost the future. A new power has suddenly

appeared, a power which it is impossible yet to judge fully, but

which is certainly a wholly different force from middle-class

liberalism; different in its cardinal points of belief, different in

its tendencies in every sphere. It loves and admires neither the

legislation of middle-class Parliaments, nor the local self-

government of middle-class vestries, nor the unrestricted competition

of middle-class [38] industrialists, nor the dissidence of middle-

class Dissent and the Protestantism of middle-class Protestant

religion. I am not now praising this new force, or saying that its

own ideals are better; all I say is, that they are wholly different.

And who will estimate how much the currents of feeling created by Dr.

Newman's movement, the keen desire for beauty and sweetness which it

nourished, the deep aversion it manifested to the hardness and

vulgarity of middle-class liberalism, the strong light it turned on

the hideous and grotesque illusions of middle-class Protestantism,--

who will estimate how much all these contributed to swell the tide of

secret dissatisfaction which has mined the ground under the self-

confident liberalism of the last thirty years, and has prepared the

way for its sudden collapse and supersession? It is in this manner

that the sentiment of Oxford for beauty and sweetness conquers, and

in this manner long may it continue to conquer!

In this manner it works to the same end as culture, and there is

plenty of work for it yet to do. I have said that the new and more

democratic force which is now superseding our old middle-class

liberalism cannot yet be rightly judged. It has its [39] main

tendencies still to form. We hear promises of its giving us

administrative reform, law reform, reform of education, and I know

not what; but those promises come rather from its advocates, wishing

to make a good plea for it and to justify it for superseding middle-

class liberalism, than from clear tendencies which it has itself yet

developed. But meanwhile it has plenty of well-intentioned friends

against whom culture may with advantage continue to uphold steadily

its ideal of human perfection; that this is an inward spiritual

activity, having for its characters increased sweetness, increased

light, increased life, increased sympathy. Mr. Bright, who has a

foot in both worlds, the world of middle-class liberalism and the

world of democracy, but who brings most of his ideas from the world

of middle-class liberalism in which he was bred, always inclines to

inculcate that faith in machinery to which, as we have seen,

Englishmen are so prone, and which has been the bane of middle-class

liberalism. He complains with a sorrowful indignation of people who

"appear to have no proper estimate of the value of the franchise;" he

leads his disciples to believe,--what the Englishman is always too

ready to believe, [40] --that the having a vote, like the having a

large family, or a large business, or large muscles, has in itself

some edifying and perfecting effect upon human nature. Or else he

cries out to the democracy,--"the men," as he calls them, "upon whose

shoulders the greatness of England rests,"--he cries out to them:

"See what you have done! I look over this country and see the cities

you have built, the railroads you have made, the manufactures you

have produced, the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest

mercantile navy the world has ever seen! I see that you have

converted by your labours what was once a wilderness, these islands,

into a fruitful garden; I know that you have created this wealth, and

are a nation whose name is a word of power throughout all the world."

Why, this is just the very style of laudation with which Mr. Roebuck

or Mr. Lowe debauch the minds of the middle classes, and make such

Philistines of them. It is the same fashion of teaching a man to

value himself not on what he is, not on his progress in sweetness and

light, but on the number of the railroads he has constructed, or the

bigness of the Tabernacle he has built. Only the middle classes are

told they have [41] done it all with their energy, self-reliance, and

capital, and the democracy are told they have done it all with their

hands and sinews. But teaching the democracy to put its trust in

achievements of this kind is merely training them to be Philistines

to take the place of the Philistines whom they are superseding; and

they too, like the middle class, will be encouraged to sit down at

the banquet of the future without having on a wedding garment, and

nothing excellent can then come from them. Those who know their

besetting faults, those who have watched them and listened to them,

or those who will read the instructive account recently given of them

by one of themselves, the Journeyman Engineer, will agree that the

idea which culture sets before us of perfection,--an increased

spiritual activity, having for its characters increased sweetness,

increased light, increased life, increased sympathy,--is an idea

which the new democracy needs far more than the idea of the

blessedness of the franchise, or the wonderfulness of their own

industrial performances.

Other well-meaning friends of this new power are for leading it, not

in the old ruts of middle-class [42] Philistinism, but in ways which

are naturally alluring to the feet of democracy, though in this

country they are novel and untried ways. I may call them the ways of

Jacobinism. Violent indignation with the past, abstract systems of

renovation applied wholesale, a new doctrine drawn up in black and

white for elaborating down to the very smallest details a rational

society for the future,--these are the ways of Jacobinism. Mr.

Frederic Harrison and other disciples of Comte,--one of them, Mr.

Congreve, is an old acquaintance of mine, and I am glad to have an

opportunity of publicly expressing my respect for his talents and

character,--are among the friends of democracy who are for leading it

in paths of this kind. Mr. Frederic Harrison is very hostile to

culture, and from a natural enough motive; for culture is the eternal

opponent of the two things which are the signal marks of Jacobinism,-

-its fierceness, and its addiction to an abstract system. Culture is

always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the

bent of human destiny than their friends like. A current in people's

minds sets towards new ideas; people are dissatisfied with their old

narrow stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon [43] ideas, or any

other; and some man, some Bentham or Comte, who has the real merit of

having early and strongly felt and helped the new current, but who

brings plenty of narrownesses and mistakes of his own into his

feeling and help of it, is credited with being the author of the

whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its regulation and

to guide the human race. The excellent German historian of the

mythology of Rome, Preller, relating the introduction at Rome under

the Tarquins of the worship of Apollo, the god of light, healing, and

reconciliation, observes that it was not so much the Tarquins who

brought to Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a current in the mind

of the Roman people which set powerfully at that time towards a new

worship of this kind, and away from the old run of Latin and Sabine

religious ideas. In a similar way, culture directs our attention to

the current in human affairs, and to its continual working, and will

not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes

us see, not only his good side, but also how much in him was of

necessity limited and transient; nay, it even feels a pleasure, a

sense of an increased freedom and of an ampler future, in so [44]

doing. I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to which

I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the very

incarnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable,

it seems to me, whom America has yet produced,--Benjamin Franklin,--I

remember the relief with which, after long feeling the sway of

Franklin's imperturbable common-sense, I came upon a project of his

for a new version of the Book of Job, to replace the old version, the

style of which, says Franklin, has become obsolete, and thence less

agreeable. "I give," he continues, "a few verses, which may serve as

a sample of the kind of version I would recommend." We all recollect

the famous verse in our translation: "Then Satan answered the Lord

and said: 'Doth Job fear God for nought?'" Franklin makes this:

"Does Your Majesty imagine that Job's good conduct is the effect of

mere personal attachment and affection?" I well remember how when

first I read that, I drew a deep breath of relief, and said to

myself: "After all, there is a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's

victorious good sense!" So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as

the renovator of modern society, [45] and Bentham's mind and ideas

proposed as the rulers of our future, I open the Deontology. There I

read: "While Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching

geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence of

talking wisdom and morality. This morality of theirs consisted in

words; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every

man's experience." From the moment of reading that, I am delivered

from the bondage of Bentham! the fanaticism of his adherents can

touch me no longer; I feel the inadequacy of his mind and ideas for

being the rule of human society, for perfection. Culture tends

always thus to deal with the men of a system, of disciples, of a

school; with men like Comte, or the late Mr. Buckle, or Mr. Mill.

However much it may find to admire in these personages, or in some of

them, it nevertheless remembers the text: "Be not ye called Rabbi!"

and it soon passes on from any Rabbi. But Jacobinism loves a Rabbi;

it does not want to pass on from its Rabbi in pursuit of a future and

still unreached perfection; it wants its Rabbi and his ideas to stand

for perfection, that they may with the more authority recast the

world; [46] and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture,--eternally

passing onwards and seeking,--is an impertinence and an offence. But

culture, just because it resists this tendency of Jacobinism to

impose on us a man with limitations and errors of his own along with

the true ideas of which he is the organ, really does the world and

Jacobinism itself a service.

So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of those

whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away with

culture,--culture with its inexhaustible indulgence, its

consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined

to its merciful judgment of persons. "The man of culture is in

politics," cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, "one of the poorest mortals

alive!" Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and he

complains that the man of culture stops him with a "turn for small

fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action." Of

what use is culture, he asks, except for "a critic of new books or a

professor of belles lettres?" Why, it is of use because, in presence

of the fierce exasperation which breathes, or rather, I may say,

hisses, through the whole production in which Mr. Frederic Harrison

[47] asks that question, it reminds us that the perfection of human

nature is sweetness and light. It is of use because, like religion,-

-that other effort after perfection,--it testifies that, where bitter

envying and strife are, there is confusion and every evil work.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and

light. He who works for sweetness works in the end for light also;

he who works for light works in the end for sweetness also. But he

who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and

the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works

for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond

machinery, culture hates hatred; culture has but one great passion,

the passion for sweetness and light. Yes, it has one yet greater!--

the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all

come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the

few must be imperfect until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity

are touched with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from

saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I

shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have

sweetness and light [48] for as many as possible. Again and again I

have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those

are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the

flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of

genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the

whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought,

sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real

thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light. Plenty of

people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an

intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper

for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular

literature is an example of this way of working on the masses.

Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of

ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or

party. Our religious and political organisations give an example of

this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but

culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the

level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or

that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. [49]

It seeks to do away with classes; to make all live in an atmosphere

of sweetness and light, and use ideas, as it uses them itself,

freely,--to be nourished and not bound by them.

This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles

of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a

passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end

of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their

time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh,

uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise

it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and

learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the

time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light. Such a

man was Abelard in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his

imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which

Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end

of the last century; and their services to Germany were in this way

inestimably precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments

will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the [50] works of

Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet the names of

these two men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such

as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken. Because

they humanised knowledge; because they broadened the basis of life

and intelligence; because they worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness

and light, to make reason and the will of God prevail. With Saint

Augustine they said: "Let us not leave Thee alone to make in the

secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the

firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of

thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon

the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the

revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new

arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt

crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth

labourers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou

shalt send forth new labourers to new seed-times, whereof the harvest

shall be not yet."

NOTES

22. +aphuia.

22. +aphuia, euphuia. See notes below for these words separately,

page 23.

23. +euphyês. Liddell and Scott definition: "well-grown, shapely,

goodly: graceful. II. of good natural parts: clever, witty; also 'of

good disposition.'"

23. +aphyês. Liddell and Scott definition: "without natural talent,

dull." GIF image:

31. +publicé egestas, privatim opulentia. E-text editor's

translation: public penury and private opulence.

36. +Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris? E-text editor's

translation: Which part of the world is not filled with our sorrows?

P. Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Aeneid, Book 1, Line 459.