song like the Marseillaise, have a stirring and ennobling effect upon the soul; while such a poem as Moody’s Ode in Time of Hesitation, a story like Dickens’s Christmas Carol, or a play like The Servant in efficacious than many a sermon.  The study of any art has a refining influence, teaching exactness and restraint, proportion, measure, discipline.  And in any case, if no more could be said, art and culture substitute innocent joys and excitements for dangerous ones, satisfy the craving for sense-enjoyment by providing natural outlets and developing normal powers, thus tending to check its crude and unwholesome manifestations.  In these ways they are valuable moral forces, whose usefulness we ought not to neglect.

(4) Culture socializes.  It adds to our competitive life, to our personal ambitions and self-seeking, an unselfish pleasure, a pleasure which we can share with all, and which needs to be shared to be best enjoyed.  Nothing binds men together more joyously and with less likelihood of friction than their common love of the beautiful.  All classes and all peoples, men of whatever trade or interests, may learn to love the same scarlet of dawn, the same stir and heave of the sea, that Homer loved and fixed in winged words for all men of all time.  From whatever land we come we may thrill to the words of English Shakespeare or Florentine Dante, to the chords of German Wagner and Italian Verdi, to the colors of Raphael and Murillo, to the noble thoughts of Athenian Plato, Roman Marcus Aurelius, and Russian Tolstoy.  Our opinions differ, our interests diverge, our aims often cross; but in the presence of high truth and beauty, fitly expressed, our differences are forgotten and we are conscious of our essential unity.  Prejudices and provincialisms crumble, personal eccentricities fade, barriers are broken, all sorts of fanaticisms and frictions are choked off, under the influence of a widespread cultural education.  What is most important in cultural education?  Wisdom and beauty are vague words; and to make our discussion practical we must indicate what in the ideal curriculum.  It is a matter of relative values, since nearly every study is of some worth; and the detailed decision as to subjects and methods must be left to the expert on pedagogy.  But to present the general needs that education must meet falls within our province.  In addition, then, to the particular vocational education which is to fit each man for his specific task, in addition to that physical development which must always go hand in hand with intellectual growth, in addition to that moral-religious training and that preparation for parenthood, of which we shall later speak, we may mention three important ideals to be grouped under our general conception of culture.