inate the masses with the set of ideas and judgments
constituting the creed of their own profession or party. Our religious
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[426] in the
Middle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections; and thence the boundless
emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were Lessing[427]
and Herder[428] 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 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
t