Culture and Anarchy | Page 4

page, as in the following example: [22] This is
page twenty-two. [23] This is page twenty-three.
CONTENTS
Preface: iii-lx I: 1-50 (Sweetness and Light) II: 51-92 (Doing as One
Likes) III: 93-141 (Barbarians, Philistines, Populace) IV: 142-166
(Hebraism and Hellenism) V: 166-197 (Porro Unum est Necessarium)
VI: 197-272 (Our Liberal Practitioners)

*Note: in the first edition, chapters are numbered only, not named. I
have added the third edition's titles for reference.

CULTURE AND ANARCHY (1869, FIRST EDITION)
PREFACE
[iii] My foremost design in writing this Preface is to address a word of
exhortation to the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. In the
essay which follows, the reader will often find Bishop Wilson quoted.
To me and to the members of the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge his name and writings are still, no doubt, familiar; but the
world is fast going away from old-fashioned people of his sort, and I
learnt with consternation lately from a brilliant and distinguished
votary of the natural sciences, that he had never so much as heard of
Bishop Wilson, and that he imagined me to have invented him. At a
moment when the Courts of Law have just taken off the embargo from
the recreative religion furnished on Sundays by my gifted acquaintance
and others, and when St. Martin's Hall [iv] and the Alhambra will soon
be beginning again to resound with their pulpit-eloquence, it distresses
one to think that the new lights should not only have, in general, a very
low opinion of the preachers of the old religion, but that they should
have it without knowing the best that these preachers can do. And that
they are in this case is owing in part, certainly, to the negligence of the
Christian Knowledge Society. In old times they used to print and
spread abroad Bishop Wilson's Maxims of Piety and Christianity; the
copy of this work which I use is one of their publications, bearing their
imprint, and bound in the well-known brown calf which they made
familiar to our childhood; but the date of my copy is 1812. I know of
no copy besides, and I believe the work is no longer one of those
printed and circulated by the Society. Hence the error, flattering, I own,
to me personally, yet in itself to be regretted, of the distinguished
physicist already mentioned.
But Bishop Wilson's Maxims deserve to be circulated as a religious
book, not only by comparison with the cartloads of rubbish circulated
at present under this designation, but for their own sake, and even by
comparison with the other works of the same [v] author. Over the far
better known Sacra Privata they have this advantage, that they were
prepared by him for his own private use, while the Sacra Privata were

prepared by him for the use of the public. The Maxims were never
meant to be printed, and have on that account, like a work of, doubtless,
far deeper emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,
something peculiarly sincere and first-hand about them. Some of the
best things from the Maxims have passed into the Sacra Privata; still, in
the Maxims, we have them as they first arose; and whereas, too, in the
Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as one of the clergy, and as
addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he almost always speaks solely as
a man. I am not saying a word against the Sacra Privata, for which I
have the highest respect; only the Maxims seem to me a better and a
more edifying book still. They should be read, as Joubert says Nicole
should be read, with a direct aim at practice. The reader will leave on
one side things which, from the change of time and from the changed
point of view which the change of time inevitably brings with it, no
longer suit him; enough [vi] will remain to serve as a sample of the
very best, perhaps, which our nation and race can do in the way of
religious writing. Monsieur Michelet makes it a reproach to us that, in
all the doubt as to the real author of the Imitation, no one has ever
dreamed of ascribing that work to an Englishman. It is true, the
Imitation could not well have been written by an Englishman; the
religious delicacy and the profound asceticism of that admirable book
are hardly in our nature. This would be more of a reproach to us if in
poetry, which requires, no less than religion, a true delicacy of spiritual
perception, our race had not done such great things; and if the Imitation,
exquisite as it is, did not, as I have elsewhere remarked, belong to a
class of works in which the perfect balance of human nature is lost, and
which