THE passion for having "reason and the will of God" prevail, the thought that "culture is the pursuit of perfection," is the "line upon line" of Matthew Arnold's teaching. One gets in his thesis many a glimpse of a heart for which obedience to the divine will meant rightness, harmony, beauty, and joy; yet none of the apostles of "sweetness and light" at any time seem to have actually accomplished as much toward bringing the will of God to pass as the very religious bodies which they flouted as Philistines have done. Was this because the apostles of culture mistook the end for the beginning and sought to define the will of God by a human opinion of beauty, even as narrow sectarianism sought to define it by a human opinion of duty? Though sweetness and light, the harmony and peace of an approach toward spiritual perfection, were rightly enough conceived as signs to be expected of the working of the divine will, yet after we examine the efforts of men like Ruskin, Arnold, Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott to bring light to human thinking, to irradiate the unlovingness and the unloveliness of mortal existence with gleams of a "far-off divine event," we must conclude that these splendid teachers could at the last only tell us what ought to be, but not how to bring it to pass.
There was no doubt ground for the criticism of the sectarian bitterness which has so often looked like hale,— today happily disappearing,—and yet perhaps one might see in what is scored as fanaticism the presence of a deeper impulse, of a more vital longing for union with spiritual reality than a serene culture has apprehended. Religion that is worth the name has always stood for the greatness of God and the littleness of mortal purposes and methods. Religion has not always understood the greatness of man in the image of God. but it has at least pointed out the sinfulness of the mortal man, and affirmed God. The purest philosophy has not had equal power actually to save and uplift the suffering and degraded, simply because it has not single-mindedly sought the will of God, but has rather defined for itself how the creative will would necessarily manifest itself. It was not by chance that Jesus of Nazareth was born into the home of a carpenter.
The culture of the human intellect will never bring us to God, though to find God must refine and elevate the human mind. The divine will and purpose are often declared through the minds and hearts of the unlettered. These have not set up a god of intellect or culture, whose beauty and sweetness make it harder to detect as a false god than are some of the other idols of humanity. Those who trust in refinement and courtesy and exquisite sensitiveness to art and the like, too often see themselves a superior group of the human race—even though their very culture prompts them to deny this sense of superiority as vulgar. It was not carelessly that Jesus told the Pharisees that the lowest and most despised should enter the kingdom of heaven before them. Nothing is more a barrier to spiritual progress than the sense that one has arrived. Whether inside the churches or out, the attitude of holding oneself as better than others most surely shuts one out of God's world of sweetness and light.
