"It takes a soul To move a body; it takes a high-souled man To move the masses ... even to a cleaner sty; It takes the ideal to blow a hair's-breadth off The dust of the actual--Ah, your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within."
He who believes in culture must believe in God; for what but God do we mean when we talk of loving the best thoughts and the highest beauty? No God, no best; but at most better and worse. And how shall a man's delight in his growing knowledge not be blighted by a hidden taint, if he is persuaded that at the core of the universe there is only blind unconscious force? But if he believe that God is infinite power working for truth and love, then can he also feel that in seeking to prepare his mind for the perception of truth and his heart for the love of what is good and fair, he is working with God, and moves along the way in which his omnipotent hand guides heavenly spirits and all the countless worlds. He desires that all men should be wiser and stronger and more loving, even though he should be doomed to remain as he is, for then they would have power to help him. He is certain of himself, and feels no fear nor anger when his opinions are opposed. He learns to bear what he cannot prevent, knowing that courage and patience make tolerable immedicable ills. He feels no self-complacency, but rather the self-dissatisfaction which comes of the consciousness of possessing faculties which he can but imperfectly use. And this discontent he believes to be the infinite God stirring within the soul. As the earthquake which swallows some island in another hemisphere disturbs not the even tenor of our way, so the passions of men whose world is other than his, who dwell remote from what he contemplates and loves, shake not his tranquil mind. While they threaten and pursue, his thought moves in spheres unknown to them. He knows how little life at the best can give, and is not hard to console for the loss of anything. There is no true thought which he would not gladly make his own, even though it should be the watchword of his enemies. Since morality is practical truth, he understands that increasing knowledge will make it at once more evident and more attractive. Hatred between races and nations he holds to be not less unchristian than the hatred which arms the individual against his fellow-man. It is impossible for him to be a scoffer; for whatever has strengthened or consoled a human soul is sacred in his eyes; and wherever there is question of what is socially complex, as of a religion or a civilization, there is question of many human lives, their hopes, their joys, their strivings, their yearnings, disappointments, agonies, and deaths; and he is able to perceive that in the ports of levity there is no refuge for hearts that mourn. Does not love itself, in its heaven of bliss, turn away from him who mocks? The lover of the intellectual life knows neither contempt nor indignation, is not elated by success or cast down by failure; money cannot make him rich, and poverty helps to make him free. His own experience teaches him that men in becoming wiser will become nobler and happier; and this sweet truth has in his eyes almost the elements of a religion. With growing knowledge his power of sympathy is enlarged; until like Saint Francis, he can call the sun his brother and the moon his sister; can grieve with homeless winds, and feel a kinship with the clod. The very agonies by which his soul has been wrung open to his gaze visions of truth which else he had never caught, and so he finds even in things evil some touch of goodness. Praise and blame are for children, but to him impertinent. He is tolerant of absurdity because it is so all-pervading that he whom it fills with indignation can have no repose. While he labors like other men to keep his place in the world, he strives to make the work whereby he maintains himself, and those who cling to him, serve intellectual and moral ends. He has a meek and lowly heart, and he has also a free and illumined mind, and a soul without fear.