is lost by refinement—­at least, that there is danger that the plain, blunt, essential truths will be lost in aesthetic graces.  The laborer is getting to consent that his son shall go to school, and learn how to build an undershot wheel or to assay metals; but why plant in his mind those principles of taste which will make him as sensitive to beauty as to pain, why open to him those realms of imagination with the illimitable horizons, the contours and colors of which can but fill him with indefinite longing?

It is not necessary for me in this presence to dwell upon the value of culture.  I wish rather to have you notice the gulf that exists between what the majority want to know and that fine fruit of knowledge concerning which there is so widespread an infidelity.  Will culture aid a minister in a “protracted meeting”?  Will the ability to read Chaucer assist a shop-keeper?  Will the politician add to the “sweetness and light” of his lovely career if he can read the “Battle of the Frogs and the Mice” in the original?  What has the farmer to do with the “Rose Garden of Saadi”?

I suppose it is not altogether the fault of the majority that the true relation of culture to common life is so misunderstood.  The scholar is largely responsible for it; he is largely responsible for the isolation of his position, and the want of sympathy it begets.  No man can influence his fellows with any power who retires into his own selfishness, and gives himself to a self-culture which has no further object.  What is he that he should absorb the sweets of the universe, that he should hold all the claims of humanity second to the perfecting of himself?  This effort to save his own soul was common to Goethe and Francis of Assisi; under different manifestations it was the same regard for self.  And where it is an intellectual and not a spiritual greediness, I suppose it is what an old writer calls “laying up treasures in hell.”

It is not an unreasonable demand of the majority that the few who have the advantages of the training of college and university should exhibit the breadth and sweetness of a generous culture, and should shed everywhere that light which ennobles common things, and without which life is like one of the old landscapes in which the artist forgot to put sunlight.  One of the reasons why the college-bred man does not meet this reasonable expectation is that his training, too often, has not been thorough and conscientious, it has not been of himself; he has acquired, but he is not educated.  Another is that, if he is educated, he is not impressed with the intimacy of his relation to that which is below him as well as that which is above him, and his culture is out of sympathy with the great mass that needs it, and must have it, or it will remain a blind force in the world, the lever of demagogues who preach social anarchy and misname it progress.  There is no culture so high, no taste so fastidious, no grace of learning so delicate, no refinement of art so exquisite, that it cannot at this hour find full play for itself in the broadest fields of humanity; since it is all needed to soften the attritions of common life, and guide to nobler aspirations the strong materialistic influences of our restless society.