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 5 and light, 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 one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. 10 It has one even 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 sweet- 15 ness 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 for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those 20 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 25 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 30 adapted in the way they think proper for th condition of the masses. The ordinary popula ctual era дат on the masse ture 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. Qur 5 religious and political organisations give an example of this way of working on the masses. I condemm 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 10 own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as 15 it uses them itself, freely, 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, 20 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 25 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; 30 and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end of the last century; culture y Lessing and Herder and their services to Germany were in this way in- 1 Hebraism and Hellenism. THIS fundamental ground is our preference of doing to thinking. Now this preference is a main element in our nature, and as we study it we find ourselves opening up a number of large questions on every side. 5 Let me go back for a moment to Bishop Wilson, who says: First, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness." We show, as a nation, laudable energy and persistence in walking according to the best light we Io have, but are not quite careful enough, perhaps, to see that our light be not darkness. This is only another version of the old story that energy is our strong point and favourable characteristic, rather than intelTigence. But we may give to this idea a more general 15 form still, in which it will have a yet larger range of application. We may regard this energy driving at practice, this paramount sense of the obligation of duty, self-control, and work, this earnestness in going manfully with the best light we have, as one force. 20 And we may regard the intelligence driving at those ideas which are, after all, the basis of right practice, the ardent sense for all the new and changing combinations of them which man's development brings with it, the indomitable impulse to know and adjust 25 them perfectly, as another force. And these two forces we may regard as in some sense. rivals,―rivals Hellenism not by the necessity of their own nature, but as exhibited in man and his history, and rivals dividing the empire of the world between them. And to give these forces names from the two races of men who have supplied the most signal and splendid manifesta- 5 tions of them, we may call them respectively the forces of Hebraism and Hellenism. Hebraism and Hellenism,-between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the Io other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them. The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man's perfection or salvation. The very language 15 which they both of them use in schooling us to reach this aim is often identical. Eye when their language indicates by variation,-sometimes a broad variation, often a but slight and subtle variation, the different courses of thought which are uppermost in each dis- 20 cipline, even then the unity of the final end and aim is still apparent. To employ the actual words of that discipline with which we ourselves are all of us most familiar, and the words of which, therefore, come most home to us, that final end and aim is "that we 25 might be partakers of the divine nature." These are the words of a Hebrew apostle, but of Hellenism and Hebraism alike this is, I say, the aim. When the two are confronted, as they very often are confronted, it is nearly always with what I may call a rhetorical 30 purpose; the speaker's whole design is to exalt and enthrone one of the two, and he uses the other only as |