the Book of Job, 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, [45] and Bentham’s mind and ideas proposed as the rulers of our future, I open the Deontology.  There I read:  “While Xenophon was writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato were talking nonsense under pretence 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 being the rule of human society, for perfection.  Culture tends always thus to deal with the men of a system, of disciples, of a school; with men like Comte, or the late Mr. Buckle, or Mr. Mill.  However much it may find to admire in these personages, or in some of them, it nevertheless remembers the text:  “Be not ye called Rabbi!” and it soon passes on from any Rabbi.  But Jacobinism loves a Rabbi; it does not want to pass on from its Rabbi in pursuit of a future and still unreached perfection; it wants its Rabbi and his ideas to stand for perfection, that they may with the more authority recast the world; [46] and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture,—­eternally passing onwards and seeking,—­is an impertinence and an offence.  But culture, just because it resists this tendency of Jacobinism to impose on us a man with limitations and errors of his own along with the true ideas of which he is the organ, really does the world and Jacobinism itself a service.

So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of those whom it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away with culture,—­culture with its inexhaustible indulgence, its consideration of circumstances, its severe judgment of actions joined to its merciful judgment of persons.  “The man of culture is in politics,” cries Mr. Frederic Harrison, “one of the poorest mortals alive!” Mr. Frederic Harrison wants to be doing business, and he complains that the man of culture stops him with a “turn for small fault-finding, love of selfish ease, and indecision in action.”  Of what use is culture, he asks, except for “a critic of new books or a professor of belles lettres?”