e condition that one was to become just like these people by
having it?" And thus culture begets a dissatisfaction which is of the
highest possible value in stemming the common tide of men's thoughts in
a wealthy and industrial community, and which saves the future, as one
may hope, from being vulgarized, even if it cannot save the present.

Population, again, and bodily health and vigor, are things which are
nowhere treated in such an unintelligent, misleading, exaggerated way as
in England. Both are really machinery; yet how many people all around us
do we see rest in them and fail to look beyond them! Why, one has heard
people, fresh from reading certain articles of the _Times_ on the
Registrar-General's returns of marriages and births in this country, who
would talk of our large English families in quite a solemn strain, as if
they had something in itself beautiful, elevating, and meritorious in
them; as if the British Philistine would have only to present himself
before the Great Judge with his twelve children, in order to be received
among the sheep as a matter of right!

But bodily health and vigor, it may be said, are not to be classed with
wealth and population as mere machinery; they have a more real and
essential value. True; but only as they are more intimately connected
with a perfect spiritual condition than wealth or population are. The
moment we disjoin them from the idea of a perfect spiritual condition,
and pursue them, as we do pursue them, for their own sake and as ends in
themselves, our worship of them becomes as mere worship of machinery, as
our worship of wealth or population, and as unintelligent and
vulgarizing a worship as that is. Every one with anything like an
adequate idea of human perfection has distinctly marked this
subordination to higher and spiritual ends of the cultivation of bodily
vigor and activity. "Bodily exercise profiteth little; but godliness is
profitable unto all things,"[398] says the author of the Epistle to
Timothy. And the utilitarian Franklin says just as explicitly:--"Eat and
drink such an exact quantity as suits the constitution of thy body, _in
reference to the services of the mind_."[399] But the point of view of
culture, keeping the mark of human perfection simply and broadly in
view, and not assigning to this perfection, as religion or
utilitarianism assigns to it, a special and limited character, this
point of view, I say, of culture is best given by these word