perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things,"--as Swift, who of one of the two, at any rate, had himself all too little, most happily calls them in his _Battle of the Books_,--"the two noblest of things, _sweetness and light_."[401] The[Greek: euphuaes] is the man who tends towards sweetness and light; the[Greek: aphuaes], on the other hand, is our Philistine. The immense spiritual significance of the Greeks is due to their having been inspired with this central and happy idea of the essential character of human perfection; and Mr. Bright's misconception of culture, as a smattering of Greek and Latin, comes itself, after all, from this wonderful significance of the Greeks having affected the very machinery of our education, and is in itself a kind of homage to it. In thus making sweetness and light to be characters of perfection, culture is of like spirit with poetry, follows one law with poetry. Far more than on our freedom, our population, and our industrialism, many amongst us rely upon our religious organizations to save us. I have called religion a yet more important manifestation of human nature than poetry, because it has worked on a broader scale for perfection, and with greater masses of men. But the idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all its sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea, though it has not yet had the success that the idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a human nature perfect on the moral side,--which is the dominant idea of religion,--has been enabled to have; and it is destined, adding to itself the religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern the other.