and. But
what _is_ greatness?--culture makes us ask. Greatness is a spiritual
condition worthy to excite love, interest, and admiration; and the
outward proof of possessing greatness is that we excite love, interest,
and admiration. If England were swallowed up by the sea to-morrow, which
of the two, a hundred years hence, would most excite the love, interest,
and admiration of mankind,--would most, therefore, show the evidences of
having possessed greatness,--the England of the last twenty years, or
the England of Elizabeth, of a time of splendid spiritual effort, but
when our coal, and our industrial operations depending on coal, were
very little developed? Well, then, what an unsound habit of mind it must
be which makes us talk of things like coal or iron as constituting the
greatness of England, and how salutary a friend is culture, bent on
seeing things as they are, and thus dissipating delusions of this kind
and fixing standards of perfection that are real!

Wealth, again, that end to which our prodigious works for material
advantage are directed,--the commonest of commonplaces tells us how men
are always apt to regard wealth as a precious end in itself: and
certainly they have never been so apt thus to regard it as they are in
England at the present time. Never did people believe anything more
firmly than nine Englishmen out of ten at the present day believe that
our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich. Now, the
use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard
of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as
a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to
perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for this purging effect
wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well
as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people
who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being
very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich,
are just the very people whom we call Philistines. Culture says:
"Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their
manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively;
observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure,
the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make
the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having
with th