The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.
He who works for sweetness and light, works to make reason and the will
of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred,
works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates
hatred; culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and
light. It has one even yet greater!--the passion for making them
_prevail_. It is not satisfied till we _all_ come to a perfect man; it
knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect until
the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and
light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness
and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have a
broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible.
Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of
humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those
are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative
power of genius, when there is a _national_ glow of life and thought,
when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by
thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive.
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