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 laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise 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 in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited.  Such were Lessing and Herder 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 [50] 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.  Because they humanised 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 knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth labourers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou shalt send forth new labourers to new seed-times, whereof the harvest shall be not yet.”

NOTES

22. +aphuia.

22. +aphuia, euphuia.  See notes below for these words separately, page 23.

23. +euphyes.  Liddell and Scott definition:  “well-grown, shapely, goodly:  graceful.  II. of good natural parts:  clever, witty; also ’of good disposition.’”

23. +aphyes.  Liddell and Scott definition:  “without natural talent, dull.”  GIF image: 

31. +publice egestas, privatim opulentia.  E-text editor’s translation:  public penury and private opulence.

36. +Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?  E-text editor’s translation:  Which part of the world is not filled with our sorrows?  P. Vergilius Maro (Virgil), Aeneid, Book 1, Line 459.

CHAPTER II