." [23]

To this Pindar adds the petition that, "being dead I may set upon my
children a name that shall be of no ill report." [24] Even the ideal
of the philosophers is only a refinement of this; {111} recognizing the
superiority of such activities as engage the imagination or reason, but
nevertheless finding happiness to be complete in terms of the
fulfilment of the dominant desires within the existing political
community. This conception was vaguely distrusted, it is true; but it
represents the characteristic enlightenment of the most enlightened
centre of Greek life. Its insufficiency was not clearly demonstrated
until the advent of Christianity; when it was proved to lie in a lack
of _pity_. Now pity is not, as is sometimes supposed, a kind of
weakness; it is a kind of knowledge, wherewith men are reminded of
obscure and neglected interests. It is easy to understand why the
Christian revolution should have been regarded as destructive of
culture. For it meant not the qualitative refinement of the good, but
the quantitative distribution of it. But it none the less marks an
epoch in moral enlightenment; since the bringing of all men up to one
level of opportunity and welfare is as essential a part of the good as
the cultivation of distinction.

The modern worldliness consists not in a lack of pity, but in a lack of
_imagination_. Philistinism, as Matthew Arnold describes it, is a
complacent satisfaction with the _kind_ of good that is praised and
sought for in any given time. Such complacency is found in its most
extreme form among those reformers or even religious leaders who are
{112} devoted to the saving of men; for these come to overrate their
wares through the very act of pressing them upon others. Matthew
Arnold never tires of illustrating this from the Liberal propaganda of
his day:

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, a harmonious
perfection.[25]

In other words, both humanism and humanitarianism may be lacking in
humanity: humanism, on account of its insensibility to pain and hunger
and poverty when these lie outside a narro