“The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky:
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.”
It is therefore, in the judgment of the best even of our own day, fully worth the trouble to strive for true culture, and all attain who really desire—rich or poor, learned or unlearned. Indeed, what Christ first said for his own generation is also very appropriate for ours, that simple souls and modest lives stand much more intimately near to true culture, and on the way to it do not meet so many and so great hindrances as do the wise and the prudent, and especially the rich, who must first strip off infinitely many prejudices and attachments to outward things, all of which are irreconcilable with true culture.
It is therefore harder for some and easier for others to attain to culture, but for none impossible, save those whose mind is wholly bound up with material things, and are satisfied besides with a merely external culture that is rather form and show than reality, however much it may claim to be real.
An ancient Chinese philosopher has already expressed this very well in the following verses, somewhat naïvely translated:
“Men who win the highest prize
Are quick to learn and quickly wise;