[22] “Bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness is profitable unto all things,” says the author of the Epistle to Timothy.  And the utilitarian Franklin says just as explicitly:—­“Eat and drink such an exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy body, in reference to the services of the mind.”  But the point of view of culture, keeping the mark of human perfection simply and broadly in view, and not assigning to this perfection, as religion or utilitarianism assign to it, a special and limited character,—­this point of view, I say, of culture is best given by these words of Epictetus:—­“It is a sign of aphuia"+ says he,—­that is, of a nature not finely tempered,—­“to give yourselves up to things which relate to the body; to make, for instance, a great fuss about exercise, a great fuss about eating, a great fuss about drinking, a great fuss about walking, a great fuss about riding.  All these things ought to be done merely by the way:  the formation of the spirit and character must be our real concern.”  This is admirable; and, indeed, the Greek words aphuia, euphuia,+ a finely tempered nature, a coarsely tempered nature, give exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to conceive of it:  a perfection in which the [23] characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites “the two noblest of things,”—­as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too little, most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books,—­“the two noblest of things, sweetness and light.”  The euphyes+ is the man who tends towards sweetness and light; the aphyes+ is precisely our Philistine.  The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential character of human perfection; and Mr. Bright’s misconception of culture, as a smattering of Greek and Latin, conies itself, after all, from this wonderful significance of the Greeks having affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it.

It is by thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection, that culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry.  I have called religion a more important manifestation of human nature than poetry, because it has worked on a broader scale for perfection, and with greater masses of men.  But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea, though it [24] has not yet had the success that the idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a human nature perfect on the moral side, which is the dominant idea of religion, has been enabled to have; and it is destined, adding to itself the religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern the other.  The best art and poetry of the Greeks, in which religion and poetry are one, in which the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect