ublicly
expressing my respect for his talents and character,--are among the
friends of democracy who are for leading it in paths of this kind. Mr.
Frederic Harrison is very hostile to culture, and from a natural enough
motive; for culture is the eternal opponent of the two things which are
the signal marks of Jacobinism,--its fierceness, and its addiction to
an abstract system. Culture is always assigning to system-makers and
systems a smaller share in the bent of human destiny than their friends
like. A current in people's minds sets towards new ideas; people are
dissatisfied with their old narrow stock of Philistine ideas,
Anglo-Saxon ideas, or any other; and some man, some Bentham[419] or
Comte, who has the real merit of having early and strongly felt and
helped the new current, but who brings plenty of narrowness and mistakes
of his own into his feeling and help of it, is credited with being the
author of the whole current, the fit person to be entrusted with its
regulation and to guide the human race.

The excellent German historian of the mythology of Rome, Preller,[420]
relating the introduction at Rome under the Tarquins of the worship of
Apollo, the god of light, healing, and reconciliation, will have us
observe that it was not so much the Tarquins who brought to Rome the new
worship of Apollo, as a current in the mind of the Roman people which
set powerfully at that time towards a new worship of this kind, and away
from the old run of Latin and Sabine religious ideas. In a similar way,
culture directs our attention to the natural current there is in human
affairs, and to its continual working, and will not let us rivet our
faith upon any one man and his doings. It makes us see not only his good
side, but also how much in him was of necessity limited and transient;
nay, it even feels a pleasure, a sense of an increased freedom and of an
ampler future, in so doing.

I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to which I feel the
greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the very incarnation of
sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable, it seems to me,
whom America has yet produced,--Benjamin Franklin,--I remember the
relief with which, after long feeling the sway of Franklin's
imperturbable common-sense, I came upon a project of his for a new
version of the Book of Job,[421] to replace the old version, the style
of which, says Franklin, has become obsolete, and thence less
agreeable. "