Culture is always assigning to system-makers and systems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends like.  A current in people’s minds sets towards new ideas; people are dissatisfied with their old narrow stock of Philistine ideas, Anglo-Saxon ideas, or any other; and some man, some Bentham[419] or Comte, who has the real merit of having early and strongly felt and helped the new current, but who brings plenty of narrowness and mistakes of his own into his feeling and help of it, is credited with being the author of the whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its regulation and to guide the human race.

The excellent German historian of the mythology of Rome, Preller,[420] relating the introduction at Rome under the Tarquins of the worship of Apollo, the god of light, healing, and reconciliation, will have us observe that it was not so much the Tarquins who brought to Rome the new worship of Apollo, as a current in the mind of the Roman people which set powerfully at that time towards a new worship of this kind, and away from the old run of Latin and Sabine religious ideas.  In a similar way, culture directs our attention to the natural current there is in human affairs, and to its continual working, and will not let us rivet our faith upon any one man and his doings.  It makes us see not only his good side, but also how much in him was of necessity limited and transient; nay, it even feels a pleasure, a sense of an increased freedom and of an ampler future, in so doing.

I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to which I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the very incarnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable, it seems to me, whom America has yet produced,—­Benjamin Franklin,—­I remember the relief with which, after long feeling the sway of Franklin’s imperturbable common-sense, I came upon a project of his for a new version of the Book of Job,[421] to replace the old version, the style of which, says Franklin, has become obsolete, and thence less agreeable.  “I give,” he continues, “a few verses, which may serve as a sample of the kind of version I would recommend.”  We all recollect the famous verse in our translation:  “Then Satan answered the Lord and said:  ‘Doth Job fear God for nought?’” Franklin makes this:  “Does your Majesty imagine that Job’s good conduct is the effect of mere personal attachment and affection?” I well remember how, when first I read that, I drew a deep breath of relief and said to myself:  “After all, there is a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin’s victorious good sense!” So, after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator of modern society, and Bentham’s mind and ideas proposed as the rulers of our future, I open the Deontology.[422] There I read:  “While Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretense of talking wisdom and morality.  This morality of theirs consisted in words; this wisdom of theirs was the denial of matters known to every man’s experience.”  From the moment of reading that, I am delivered from the bondage of Bentham! the fanaticism of his adherents can touch me no longer.  I feel the inadequacy of his mind and ideas for supplying the rule of human society, for perfection.