moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people’s life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.  Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light.  Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses.  The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses.  Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate 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