I give," he continues, "a few verses, which may serve as a
sample of the kind of version I would recommend." We all recollect the
famous verse in our translation: "Then Satan answered the Lord and said:
'Doth Job fear God for nought?'" Franklin makes this: "Does your Majesty
imagine that Job's good conduct is the effect of mere personal
attachment and affection?" I well remember how, when first I read that,
I drew a deep breath of relief and said to myself: "After all, there is
a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin's victorious good sense!" So,
after hearing Bentham cried loudly up as the renovator of modern
society, and Bentham's mind and ideas proposed as the rulers of our
future, I open the _Deontology._[422] There I read: "While Xenophon was
writing his history and Euclid teaching geometry, Socrates and Plato
were talking nonsense under pretense of talking wisdom and morality.
This morality of theirs consisted in words; this wisdom of theirs was
the denial of matters known to every man's experience." From the moment
of reading that, I am delivered from the bondage of Bentham! the
fanaticism of his adherents can touch me no longer. I feel the
inadequacy of his mind and ideas for supplying the rule of human
society, for perfection.

Culture tends always thus to deal with the men of a system, of
disciples, of a school; with men like Comte, or the late Mr. Buckle,
[423] or Mr. Mill.[424] However much it may find to admire in these
personages, or in some of them, it nevertheless remembers the text: "Be
not ye called Rabbi!" and it soon passes on from any Rabbi. But
Jacobinism loves a Rabbi; it does not want to pass on from its Rabbi in
pursuit of a future and still unreached perfection; it wants its Rabbi
and his ideas to stand for perfection, that they may with the more
authority recast the world; and for Jacobinism, therefore, culture,--
eternally passing onwards and seeking,--is an impertinence and an
offence. But culture, just because it resists this tendency of
Jacobinism to impose on us a man with limitations and errors of his own
along with the true ideas of which he is the organ, really does the
world and Jacobinism itself a service.

So, too, Jacobinism, in its fierce hatred of the past and of those whom
it makes liable for the sins of the past, cannot away with the
inexhaustible indulgence proper to culture, the consideration of
circumstances, the severe judgment of actions joined to the merciful
judgment of