s constituting the creed of their own profession or
party.

Our religions and political organizations 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. 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 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, for making
prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best
knowledge, the best ideas of their time, who have labored to divest
knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract,
professional, exclusive; to humanize 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 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.

And why? Because they humanized knowledge; because they broadened the
basis of life and intelligence; because they worked powerfully to
diffuse the 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
th