specially those three, and no more than those "creep," and "intrude," and "climb;" no other words would or could serve the turn, and no more could be added. For they exhaustively comprehend the three classes, correspondent to 70 the three characters, of men who dishonestly seek ecclesiastical power. First, those who "creep" into the fold; who do not care for office, nor name, but for secret influence, and do all things occultly and cunningly, consenting to any servility of office or conduct, so only that they may intimately discern, 75 and unawares direct, the minds of men. Then those who "intrude" (thrust, that is) themselves into the fold, who by natural insolence of heart, and stout eloquence of tongue, and fearlessly perseverant self-assertion, obtain hearing and authority with the common crowd. Lastly, those who 80" climb," who, by labour and learning, both stout and sound, but selfishly exerted in the cause of their own ambition, gain high dignities and authorities, and become "lords over the heritage," though not "ensamples to the flock.”

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Now go on:

"Of other care they little reckoning make,

Than how to scramble at the shearer's feast.
Blind mouths·

I pause again, for this is a strange expression; a broken metaphor, one might think, careless and unscholarly.

Not so its very audacity and pithiness are intended to make us look close at the phrase and remember it. Those two monosyllables express the precisely accurate contraries of right character, in the two great offices of the Church those of bishop and pastor.

A Bishop means a person who sees.

A Pastor means one who feeds.

The most unbishoply character a man can have is therefore to be Blind.

The most unpastoral is, instead of feeding, to want to be

Take the two reverses together, and you have "blind mouths." We may advisably follow out this idea a little. Nearly all the evils in the Church have arisen from bishops desiring power more than light. They want authority, not outlook. Whereas their real office is not to rule; though it 105 may be vigorously to exhort and rebuke; it is the king's office to rule; the bishop's office is to oversee the flock; to number it, sheep by sheep; to be ready always to give full account of it. Now it is clear he cannot give account of the souls, if he has not so much as numbered the bodies of his 110 flock.

The first thing, therefore, that a bishop has to do is at least to put himself in a position in which, at any moment, he can obtain the history from childhood of every living soul in his diocese, and of its present state. Down in that back 115 street, Bill, and Nancy, knocking each other's teeth out? Does the bishop know all about it? Has he his eye upon them? Has he had his eye upon them? Can he circumstantially explain to us how Bill got into the habit of beating Nancy about the head? If he cannot, he is no bishop 120 though he had a mitre as high as Salisbury steeple; he is no bishop, he has sought to be at the helm instead of the masthead; he has no sight of things. "Nay," you say, it is not his duty to look after Bill in the back street. What! the fat sheep that have full fleeces — you think it is only those 125 he should look after, while (go back to your Milton) “the hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, besides what the grim wolf, with privy paw" (bishops knowing nothing about it) "daily devours apace, and nothing said?"

"But that's not our idea of a bishop." Perhaps not; but 130 it was St. Paul's; and it was Milton's. They may be right, or we may be; but we must not think we are reading

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either one or the other by putting our meaning into their words.

I go on.

"But, swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw."

This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are not looked after in their bodies, they are in their souls; they have spiritual food."

And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual food; they are only swollen with wind." At first you may think that is a coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, it is a quite literally accurate one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of "spirit." 145 It is only a contraction of the Latin word "breath," and an indistinct translation of the Greek word for "wind." The same word is used in writing, "The wind bloweth where it listeth;" and in writing, "So is every one that is born of the Spirit;" born of the breath, that is; for it mears the breath 150 of God, in soul and body.

We have the true sense of it in our words "inspiration" and "expire." Now, there are two kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled; God's breath, and man's. The breath of God is health, and life, and peace to them, 155 as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath the word which he calls spiritual, is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapours of its own decomposition. This is literally true 160 of all false religious teaching; the first, and last, and fatalest sign of it is that "puffing up." Your converted children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking 165 to the fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore

His peculiar people and messengers;

your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong; and pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be saved by thinking 170 rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of work: these are the true fog children clouds, these, without water; bodies, these, of putrescent vapour and skin, without blood or flesh: blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with corrupt, and corrupting, - 175 "Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw."

Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of the keys, for now we can understand them. Note the difference between Milton and Dante in their interpretation of this power: for once, the latter is weaker in thought; he sup- 180 poses both the keys to be of the gate of heaven; one is of gold, the other of silver: they are given by St. Peter to the sentinel angel; and it is not easy to determine the meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the gate, or of the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key of 185 heaven; the other, of iron, the key of the prison, in which the wicked teachers are to be bound who "have taken away the key of knowledge, yet entered not in themselves."

We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to see, and feed; and, of all who do so, it is said, "He that 190 watereth, shall be watered also himself." But the reverse is truth also. He that watereth not, shall be withered himself, and he that seeth not, shall himself be shut out of sight, shut into the perpetual prison-house. And that prison opens here, as well as hereafter he who is to be bound in heaven 195 must first be bound on earth. That command to the strong angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, "Take him, and bind him hand and foot, and cast him out," issues, in its measure, against the teacher, for every help withheld, and for

200 every truth refused, and for every falsehood enforced; so that he is more strictly fettered the more he fetters, and farther outcast, as he more and more misleads, till at last the bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as "the golden opes, the iron shuts amain."

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We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is yet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which is rightly called "reading;" watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves 210 always in the author's place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus I thought, in mis-reading Milton." And by this process you will gradually come to attach less weight to your own "Thus I thought" at 215 other times. You will begin to perceive that what you

thought was a matter of no serious importance; - that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon:- in fact, that unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to 220 have any "thoughts" at all; that you have no materials for them, in any serious matter; 1- no right to "think," but only to try to learn more of the facts.

1

MATTHEW ARNOLD

A Definition of Culture

(From Culture and Anarchy: Chap. I," Sweetness and Light ")

The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself

1 Modern "Education" for the most part signifies giving people the faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to them. [Ruskin's note.]