manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality.  It places it in the ever-increasing efficacy and in the general harmonious expansion of those gifts of thought and feeling, which make the peculiar dignity, wealth, and happiness of human nature.  As I have said on a former occasion:  “It is in making endless additions to itself, in the endless expansion of its powers, in endless growth in wisdom and beauty, that the spirit of the human race finds its ideal.  To reach this ideal, culture is an indispensable aid, and that is the true value of culture.”  Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming, is the character of perfection as culture conceives it; and here, too, it coincides with religion.

And because men are all members of one great whole, and the sympathy which is in human nature will not allow one member to be indifferent to the rest or to have a perfect welfare independent of the rest, the expansion of our humanity, to suit the idea of perfection which culture forms, must be a general expansion.  Perfection, as culture conceives it, is not possible while the individual remains isolated.  The individual is required, under pain of being stunted and enfeebled in his own development if he disobeys, to carry others along with him in his march towards perfection, to be continually doing all he can to enlarge and increase the volume of the human stream sweeping thitherward.  And, here, once more, culture lays on us the same obligation as religion, which says, as Bishop Wilson has admirably put it, that “to promote the kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one’s own happiness."[394]

But, finally, perfection,—­as culture from a thorough disinterested study of human nature and human experience learns to conceive it,—­is a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature, and is not consistent with the over-development of any one power at the expense of the rest.  Here culture goes beyond religion as religion is generally conceived by us.

If culture, then, is a study of perfection, and of harmonious perfection, general perfection, and perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances,—­it is clear that culture, instead or being the frivolous and useless thing which Mr. Bright,[395] and Mr. Frederic Harrison,[396] and many other Liberals are apt to call it, has a very important function to fulfil for mankind.  And this function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilization is, to a much greater degree than the civilization of Greece and Rome, mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so.  But above all in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical character, which civilization