[51] I have been trying to show that culture is, or ought to be, the study and pursuit of perfection; and that of perfection as pursued by culture, beauty and intelligence, or, in other words, sweetness and light, are the main characters.  But hitherto I have been insisting chiefly on beauty, or sweetness, as a character of perfection.  To complete rightly my design, it evidently remains to speak also of intelligence, or light, as a character of perfection.  First, however, I ought perhaps to notice that, both here and on the other side of the Atlantic, all sorts of objections are raised against the “religion of culture,” as the objectors mockingly call it, which I am supposed to be promulgating.  It is said to be a religion proposing parmaceti, or some scented salve or other, as a cure for human miseries; a religion breathing a spirit of cultivated inaction, making its believer refuse to lend a hand at uprooting the definite evils on all sides of us, and filling him with antipathy against the reforms and reformers which try to [52] extirpate them.  In general, it is summed up as being not practical, or,—­as some critics more familiarly put it,—­all moonshine.  That Alcibiades, the editor of the Morning Star, taunts me, as its promulgator, with living out of the world and knowing nothing of life and men.  That great austere toiler, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, upbraids me,—­but kindly, and more in sorrow than in anger,—­for trifling with aesthetics and poetical fancies, while he himself, in that arsenal of his in Fleet Street, is bearing the burden and heat of the day.  An intelligent American newspaper, the Nation, says that it is very easy to sit in one’s study and find fault with the course of modern society, but the thing is to propose practical improvements for it.  While, finally, Mr. Frederic Harrison, in a very good-tempered and witty satire, which makes me quite understand his having apparently achieved such a conquest of my young Prussian friend, Arminius, at last gets moved to an almost stern moral impatience, to behold, as he says, “Death, sin, cruelty stalk among us, filling their maws with innocence and youth,” and me, in the midst of the general tribulation, handing out my pouncet-box.

[53] It is impossible that all these remonstrances and reproofs should not affect me, and I shall try my very best, in completing my design and in speaking of light as one of the characters of perfection, and of culture as giving us light, to profit by the objections I have heard and read, and to drive at practice as much as I can, by showing the communications and passages into practical life from the doctrine which I am inculcating.