gious organizations 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.

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 political organization,--or
whether it is a religious organization,--oppose with might and main the
tendency to this or that political and religious organization, 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 criticized, 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 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
indus