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And what is that image of the Christ, what is that world-ideal, the height of human thought, but the work of the creative reason, not of genius, not of the great in mind and fortunate in gifts, but of the race itself, in proud and humble, in saint and sinner, in the happy and the wretched, in all the vast range of the millions of the dead whose thoughts live embodied in that great tradition, the supreme and perfected pattern of mankind?
He had been prepared to find that the world-ideal had grown more lofty in his absence, been purified by many eliminations into a God who, as he had once said to Nance, could no more spare the soul of a Hottentot than the soul of a pope.
In history the climaxes of art have always outrun human realization; its crests in Greece, Italy, and England are crests of the never-attained; but they still make on in their mass to the yet rising wave, which shall be of mankind universal, if, indeed, in the cosmopolitan civilization which we hope for, the elements of the past, yet surviving from the accomplishment of single famous cities and great empires, shall be blended in a world-ideal, expressing the spiritual uplifting to God of the reconciled and unified nations of the earth.
The star on the Tree bore it back to Chaldaea; the candle bore it to ancient Persia; the cross bore it to the Nile and Isis and Osiris; the dove bore it to Syria; the bell bore it to Confucius; the drum bore it to Buddha; the drinking horn to Greece; the tinsel to Romulus and Rome; the doll to Abraham and Isaac; the masks to Gaul; the mistletoe to Britain, and all brought it to Christ, Christ the latest world-ideal of sacrifice that is self-sacrifice and of the giving of all for all.
The analysis of the present capitalist system, forming the foundation of the demand for the communization of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, as resulting in a human society as opposed to a class society, and ultimately in the extinction of national barriers in a world-federation of socialized humanity these principles were first appreciated, as a world-ideal, by the proletariat of Germany, and they have unquestionably raised that proletariat to an intellectual rank as yet equalled by no other working-class in the world.
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