Page:Culture and Anarchy, Third edition, 1882, Matthew Arnold.djvu/272

216 as being real which is not a general perfection, embracing all our fellow-men with whom we have to do. Such is the sympathy which binds humanity together, that we are indeed, as our religion says, members of one body, and if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it. Individual perfection is impossible so long as the rest of mankind are not perfected along with us. 'The multitude of the wise is the welfare of the world,' says the wise man. And to this effect that excellent and often quoted guide of ours. Bishop Wilson, has some striking words:—'It is not,' says he, 'so much our neighbour's interest as our own that we love him.' And again he says: 'Our salvation does in some measure depend upon that of others.' And the author of the Imitaton puts the same thing admirably when he says:—'Obscurior etiam via ad cœlum videbatur quando tam pauci regnum cœlorum quærere curabant; the fewer there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is to find.' So all our fellow-men, in the East of London and elsewhere, we must take along with us in the progress, towards perfection, if we ourselves really, as we profess, want to be perfect; and we must not let the worship of any fetish, any machinery, such as manufactures or population,—which are not, like perfection, absolute goods in themselves, though we think them so,—create