and that internal perfection must first be sought; but then it goes on, hand in hand with Culture, to spread perfection in widest commonalty.  “Perfection is not possible, while the individual remains isolated.”  “To promote the Kingdom of God is to increase and hasten one’s own happiness.”  Finally, Perfection as Culture conceives it, is a harmonious expansion of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature:  “and here,” says Arnold, “Culture goes beyond Religion, as Religion is generally conceived by us.”  Stress must be laid upon those last words; for Religion, according to its full and catholic ideal, is the perfection and consecration of man’s whole nature, intellectual and physical, as well as moral and spiritual.  All that is lovely, splendid, moving, heroic, even enjoyable, in human life—­all health and vigour and beauty and cleverness and charm—­all nature and all art, all science and all literature—­are among the good and perfect gifts which come down from the Father of Lights.  But this is just the conception of Religion which Puritanism never grasped—­nay, rather which Puritanism definitely rejected.”  And here probably is the origin of that quarrel with Puritanism, at least in its more superficial and obvious aspects, which so coloured and sometimes barbed Arnold’s meditations on Religion.  “As I have said with regard to wealth:  Let us look at the life of those who live in and for it—­so I say with regard to the religious organizations.  Look at the life imaged in such a newspaper as the Nonconformist—­a life of jealousy of the Establishment, disputes, tea-meetings, openings of chapels, sermons; and then think of it as an ideal of human life completing itself on all sides, and aspiring with all its organs after sweetness, light, and perfection!”

So much then for his definition of Culture; and we must admit that “the old Liberal hacks,” the speakers on Liberal platforms, and the writers in Liberal papers, were not without excuse when they failed so utterly to divine what the new Teacher meant by harping on a word which Bacon and Pope had used in so different a sense.

Chapter II is headed “Doing as One Likes.”  And here it was that our new critic came most sharply into conflict with our cherished beliefs.  We believed in the liberty which Milton loved, “to know, to utter, and to argue freely, according to conscience,” and to frame our action by sole reference to our conviction.  We believed that of such liberty there was only one endurable limit, and that was the condition that no man should so use his own liberty as to lessen his brother’s—­and the liberty thus conceived we regarded as the supreme boon of human life, for which no other could conceivably be taken in exchange.  And now came the new Teacher of Liberalism with a doctrine which, while it made us angry, also set us thinking.  “Our familiar praise of the British Constitution under which we live, is that it is a system of checks—­a