civilisation which you fancied that they forbid?"
"No. I am a Churchman, you know; principally on political grounds,
or from custom, or from-the devil knows what, perhaps-I do not."
"Probably it is God, and not the devil, who knows why, Templeton."
"Be it so-Frightful as it is to have to say it-I do not so much
care-I suppose it is all right: if it is not, it will all come
right at last. And in the meantime, I compromise, like the rest of
the world; and hear Jane making the children every week-day pray
that they may become God's children, and then teaching them every
Sunday evening the Catechism, which says that they are so already.
I don't understand it-I suppose if it was important, one would
understand it. One knows right from wrong, you know, and other
fundamentals. If that were necessary, one would know that too."
"But can you submit quietly to such a barefaced contradiction?"
"I? I am only a plain country squire. Of course I should call such
dealing with an Act of Parliament a lie and a sham-But about these
things, I fancy, the women know best. Jane is ten thousand times as
good as I am-you don't know half her worth-And I haven't the heart
to contradict her-nor the right either; for I have no reasons to
give her; no faith to substitute for hers."
"Our friend, the High-Church curate, could have given you a few
plain reasons, I should think."
"Of course he could. And I believe in my heart the man is in the
right in calling Jane wrong. He has honesty and common sense on his
side, just as he has when he calls the present state of Convocation,
in the face of that prayer for God's Spirit on its deliberations, a
blasphemous lie and sham. Of course it is. Any ensign in a
marching regiment could tell us that from his mere sense of
soldier's honour. But then-if she is wrong, is he right? How do I
know? I want reasons: he gives me historic authorities."
"And very good things too; for they are fair phenomena for
induction."
"But how will proving to me that certain people once thought a thing
right prove to me that it is right? Good people think differently
every day. Good people have thought differently about those very
matters in every age. I want some proof which will coincide with
the little which I do know about science and philosophy. They must
fight out their own battle, if they choose to fight it on mere
authority. If one could but have the implicit faith of a child, it
would be all very well: but one can't. If one has once been fool
enough to think about these things, one must have reasons, or
something better than mere ipse dixits, or one can't believe them.
I should be glad enough to believe; do you suppose that I don't envy
poor dear Jane from morning to night?-but I can't. And so-"
"And so what?" asked I.
"And so, I believe, I am growing to have no religion at all, and no
substitute for it either; for I feel I have no ground or reason for
admiring or working out any subject. I have tired of philosophy.
Perhaps it's all wrong-at least I can't see what it has to do with
God, and Christianity, and all which, if it is true, must be more
important than anything else. I have tired of art for the same
reason. How can I be anything but a wretched dilettante, when I
have no principles to ground my criticism on, beyond bosh about 'The
Beautiful'? I did pluck up heart and read Mr. Ruskin's books
greedily when they came out, because I heard he was a good
Christian. But I fell upon a little tract of his, 'Notes on
Sheepfolds,' and gave him up again, when I found that he had a
leaning to that 'Clapham sect.' I have dropped politics: for I
have no reason, no ground, no principle in them, but expediency.
When they asked me this summer to represent the interests of the
county in Parliament, I asked them how they came to make such a
mistake as to fancy that I knew what was their interest, or anyone
else's? I am becoming more and more of an animal; fragmentary,
inconsistent, seeing to the root of nothing, unable to unite things
in my own mind. I just do the duty which lies nearest, and looks
simplest. I try to make the boys grow up plucky and knowing-though
what's the use of it? They will go to college with even less
principles than I had, and will get into proportionably worse
scrapes, I expect to be ruined by their debts before I die. And for
the rest, I read nothing but "The Edinburgh" and "The Agricultural
Gazette." My talk is of bullocks. I just know right from wrong
enough to see that the farms are in good order, pay my labourers
living wages, keep the old people out of the workhouse, and see that
my cottages and schools are all right; for I suppose I was put here
for some purpose of that kind-though what it is I can't very clearly
define-And there's an end of my long story."
"Not quite an animal yet, it seems?" said I with a smile, half to
hide my own sadness at a set of experiences which are, alas! already
far too common, and will soon be more common still.
"Nearer it than you fancy. I am getting fonder and fonder of a good
dinner and a second bottle of claret-about their meaning there is no
mistake. And my principal reason for taking the hounds two years
ago was, I do believe, to have something to do in the winter which
required no thought, and to have an excuse for falling asleep after
dinner, instead of arguing with Jane about her scurrilous religious
newspapers-There is a great gulf opening, I see, between me and her-
And as I can't bridge it over I may as well forget it. Pah! I am
boring you, and over-talking myself. Have a cigar, and let us say
no more about it. There is more here, old fellow, than you will
cure by doses of Socratic Dialectics."
"I am not so sure of that," I replied. "On the contrary, I should
recommend you in your present state of mind to look out your old
Plato as quickly as possible, and see if he and his master Socrates
cannot give you, if not altogether a solution for your puzzle, at
least a method whereby you may solve it yourself. But tell me
first-What has all this to do with your evident sympathy for a man
so unlike yourself as Professor Windrush?"
"Perhaps I feel for him principally because he has broken loose from
it all in desperation, just as I have. But, to tell you the truth,
I have been reading more than one book of his school lately; and, as
I said, I owe you no thanks for demolishing the little comfort which
I seemed to find in them."
"And what was that then?"
"Why-in the first place, you can't deny that however incoherent they
may be they do say a great many clever things, and noble things too,
about man, and society, and art, and nature."
"No doubt of it."
"And moreover, they seem to connect all they say with-with-I suppose
you will laugh at me-with God, and spiritual truths, and eternal
Divine laws; in short, to consecrate common matters in that very
way, which I could not find in my poor mother's teaching."
"No doubt of that either. And therein is one real value of them, as
protests in behalf of something nobler and more unselfish than the
mere dollar-getting spirit of their country."
"Well, then, can you not see how pleasant it was to me to find
someone who would give me a peep into the unseen world, without
requiring as an entrance-fee any religious emotions and experiences?
Here I had been for years, shut out; told that I had no business
with anything eternal, and pure, and noble, and good; that to all
intents and purposes I was nothing better than a very cunning animal
who could be damned; because I was still 'carnal,' and had not been
through all Jane's mysterious sorrows and joys. And it was really
good news to me to hear that they were not required after all, and
that all I need do was to be a good man, and leave devotion to those
who were inclined to it by temperament."
"Not to be a good man," said I, "but only a good specimen of some
sort of man. That, I think, would be the outcome of Emerson's
'Representative Men,' or of those most tragic 'Memoirs of Margaret
Puller Ossoli.'"
"How then, hair-splitter? What is the mighty difference?"
"Would you call Dick Turpin a good man, because he was a good
highwayman?"
"What now?"
"That he would be an excellent representative man of his class; and
therefore, on Mr. Emerson's grounds, a fit subject for a laudatory
lecture."
"I hate reductiones ad absurdum. Let Turpin take care of himself.
I suppose I do not belong to such a very bad sort of men, but that
it may be worth my while to become a good specimen of it?"
"Certainly not; only I think, contrary to Mr. Emerson's opinion,
that you will not become even that, unless you first become
something better still, namely, a good man."
"There you are too refined for me. But can you not understand, now,
the causes of my sympathy even with Windrush and his 'spirit of
truth'?"
"I can, and those of many more. It seems that you thought you found
in that school a wider creed than the one to which you had been
accustomed?"
"There was a more comprehensive view of humanity about them, and
that pleased me."
"Doubtless, one can be easily comprehensive if one comprehends good
and bad, true and false, under one category, by denying the absolute
existence of either goodness or badness, truth or falsehood. But
let the view be as comprehensive as it will, I am afraid that the
creed founded thereon will not be very comprehensive."
"Why then?"
"Because it will comprehend so few people; fewer even than the sect
of those who will believe, with Mr. Emerson, that Harvey and Newton
made their discoveries by the 'Aristotelian method.' The sect of
those who believe that there is no absolute right and wrong, no
absolute truth external to himself, discoverable by man, will, it
seems to me, be a very narrow one to the end of time; owing to a
certain primeval superstition of our race, who, even in barbarous
countries, have always been Platonists enough to have some sort of
instinct and hope that there was a right and a wrong, and truths
independent of their own sentiments and faculties. So that, though
this school may enable you to fancy that you understand Lady Jane
somewhat more, by the simple expedient of putting on her religious
experiences an arbitrary interpretation of your own, which she would
indignantly and justly deny, it will enable her to understand you
all the less, and widen the gulf between you immeasurably."
"You are severe."
"I only wish you to face one result of a theory, which, while it
pretends to offer the most comprehensive liberality, will be found
to lead in practice to the most narrow and sectarian Epicurism for a
cultivated few. But for the many, struggling with the innate
consciousness of evil, in them and around them-an instinctive
consciousness which no argumentation about 'evil being a lower form
of good' will ever explain away to those who 'grind among the iron
facts of life, and have no time for self-deception'-what good news
for them is there in Mr. Emerson's cosy and tolerant Epicurism?
They cry for deliverance from their natures; they know that they are
not that which they were intended to be, because they follow their
natures; and he answers them with: 'Follow your natures, and be
that which you were intended to be.' You began this argument by
stipulating that I should argue with you simply as a man. Does Mr.
Emerson's argument look like doing that, or only arguing as with an
individual of that kind of man, or rather animal, to which some iron
Fate has compelled you to belong?"
"But, I say, these books have made me a better man."
"I do not doubt it. An earnest cultivated man, speaking his whole
mind to an earnest cultivated man, will hardly fail of telling him
something he did not know before. But if you had not been a
cultivated man, Templeton, a man with few sorrows, and few trials,
and few unsatisfied desires-if you had been the village shopkeeper,
with his bad debts, and his temptations to make those who can pay
for those who cannot,-if you had been one of your own labourers,
environed with the struggle for daily bread, and the alehouse, and
hungry children, and a sick wife, and a dull taste, and a duller
head-in short, if you had been a man such as nine out of ten are-
what would his school have taught you then? You want some truths
which are common to men as men, which will help and teach them, let
their temperament or their circumstances be what they will-do you
not? If you do not, your complaint of Lady Jane's exclusive Creed
is a mere selfish competition on your part, between a Creed which
will fit her peculiarities, and a Creed which will fit your
peculiarities. Do you not see that?"
"I do-go on."
"Then I say you will not find that in Professor Windrush's school.
I say you will find it in Lady Jane's Creed."
"What? In the very Creed which excludes me?"
"Whether that Creed excludes you or not is a question of the true
meaning of its words. And that again is a question of Dialectics.
I say it includes you and all mankind."
"You must mistake her doctrines, then."
"I do not, I assure you. I know what they are; and I know, also,
the misreading of them to which your dear mother's school has
accustomed her, and which has taught her that these Creeds only
belong to the few who have discovered their own share in them. But
whether the Creeds really do that or not-whether Lady Jane does not
implicitly confess that they do not by her own words and deeds of
every day, that, I say, is a question of Dialectics, in the Platonic
sense of that word, as the science which discovers the true and
false in thought, by discovering the true and false concerning the
meanings of words, which represent thought."
"Be it so. I should be glad to hold what Jane holds, for the sake
of the marvellous practical effect on her character-sweet creature
that she is!-which it has produced in the last seven years."
"And which effect, I presume, was not increased by her denying to
you any share in the same?"
"Alas, no! It is only when she falls on that-when she begins
denouncing and excluding-that all the old faults, few and light as
they are, seem to leap into ugly life again for the moment."
"Few and light, indeed! Ah, my dear Templeton, the gulf between you
and happiness looks wide; but only because it is magnified in mist."
"Which you would have me disperse by lightning-flashes of
Dialectics, eh? Well, every man has his nostrum."
"I have not. My method is not my own, but Plato's."
"But, my good fellow, the Windrush school admire Plato as much as
you do, and yet certainly arrive at somewhat different conclusions."
"They do Plato the honour of patronising him, as a Representative
Man; but their real text-book, you will find, is Proclus. That
hapless philosophaster's a priori method, even his very verbiage, is
dear to their souls; for they copy it through wet and dry, through
sense and nonsense. But as for Plato-when I find them using Plato's
weapons, I shall believe in their understanding and love of him."
"And in the meanwhile claim him as a new verger for the Reformed
Church Catholic?"
"Not a new verger, Templeton. Augustine said, fourteen hundred
years ago, that Socrates was the philosopher of the Catholic Faith.
If he has not seemed so of late years, it is, I suspect, because we
do not understand quite the same thing as Augustine did, when we
talk of the Catholic Faith and Christianity."
"But you forget, in your hurry of clerical confidence, that the
question still remains, whether these Creeds are true."
"That, too, as I take it, is a question of Dialectics, unless you
choose to reduce the whole to a balance-of-probabilities argument-
rather too narrow a basis for a World-faith to stand upon. Try all
'mythic' theories, Straussite and others, by honest Dialectics. Try
your own thoughts and experiences, and the accredited thoughts and
experiences of wise men, by the same method. Mesmerism and 'The
Development of Species' may wait till they have settled themselves
somewhat more into sciences; at present it does not much matter what
agrees or disagrees with them. But using this weapon fearlessly and
honestly, you will, unless Socrates and Plato were fools, arrive at
absolute eternal truths, which are equally true for all men, good or
bad, conscious or unconscious; and I tell you-of course you need not
believe me till you have made trial-that those truths will coincide
with the plain honest meaning of the Catholic Creeds, as determined
by the same method-the only one, indeed, by which they or anything
else can be determined."
"You forget Baconian induction, of which you are so fond."
"And pray what are Dialectics, but strict Baconian induction applied
to words, as the phenomena of mind, instead of to things, the
phenomena of-"
"What?"
"I can't tell you; or, rather, I will not. I have my own opinion
about what those trees and stones are; but it will require a few
years' more verification before I tell."
"Really, you and your Dialectics seem in a hopeful and valiant state
of mind."
"Why not? Can truth do anything but conquer?"
"Of course-assuming, as every one does, that the truth is with you."
"My dear fellow, I have seldom met a man who could not be a far
better dialectician than I shall ever be, if he would but use his
Common Sense."
"Common Sense? That really sounds something like a bathos, after
the great big Greek word which you have been propounding to me as
the cure for all my doubts."
"What? Are you about to 'gib' after all, just as I was flattering
myself that I had broken you in to go quietly in harness?"
"I am very much minded to do so. The truth is, I cannot bring
myself to believe that the universal panacea lies in an obscure and
ancient scientific method."
"Obscure and ancient? Did I not just say that any man might be a
dialectician? Did Socrates ever appeal to any faculty but the
Common Sense of man as man, which exists just as much in England
now, I presume, as it did in Athens in his day? Does he not, in
pursuance of that method of his, draw his arguments and
illustrations, to the horror of the big-worded Sophists, from dogs,
kettles, fishwives, and what not which is vulgar and commonplace?
Or did I, in my clumsy attempt to imitate him, make use of a single
argument which does not lie, developed or undeveloped, in the Common
Sense of every clown; in that human Reason of his, which is part of
God's image in him, and in every man? And has not my complaint
against Mr. Windrush's school been, that they will not do this; that
they will not accept the ground which is common to men as men, but
disregard that part of the 'Vox Populi' which is truly 'Vox Dei,'
for that which is 'Vox Diaboli'-for private sentiments, fancies, and
aspirations; and so casting away the common sense of mankind, build
up each man, on the pin's point of his own private judgment, his own
inverted pyramid?"
"But are you not asking me to do just the same, when you propose to
me to start as a Scientific Dialectician?"
"Why, what are Dialectics, or any other scientific method, but
conscious common sense? And what is common sense, but unconscious
scientific method? Every man is a dialectician, be he scholar or
boor, in as far as he tries to use no words which he does not
understand, and to sift his own thoughts, and his expression of
them, by that Reason which is at once common to men, and independent
of them."
"As M. Jourdain talked prose all his life without knowing it. Well-
I prefer the unconscious method. I have as little faith as Mr.
Carlyle would have in saying: 'Go to, let us make'-an induction
about words, or anything else. It seems to me no very hopeful
method of finding out facts as they are."
"Certainly; provided you mean any particular induction, and not a
general inductive and severely-inquiring habit of mind; that very
'Go to' being a fair sign that you have settled beforehand what the
induction shall be; in plain English, that you have come to your
conclusion already, and are now looking about for facts to prove it.
But is it any wiser to say: 'Go to, I will be conscious of being
unconscious of being conscious of my own forms of thought'? For
that is what you do say, when, having read Plato, and knowing his
method, and its coincidence with Common Sense, you determine to
ignore it on common-sense questions."
"But why not ignore it, if mother-wit does as well?"
"Because you cannot ignore it. You have learnt it more or less, and
cannot forget it, try as you will, and must either follow it, or
break it and talk nonsense. And moreover, you ought not to ignore
it. For it seems to me, that you were sent to Cambridge by One
greater than, your parents, in order that you might learn it, and
bring it home hither for the use of the M. Jourdains round you here,
who have no doubt been talking prose all their life, but may have
been also talking it very badly."
"You speak riddles."
"My dear fellow, may not a man employ Reason, or any other common
human faculty, all his life, and yet employ them very clumsily and
defectively?"
"I should say so, from the gross amount of human unwisdom."
"And that, in the case of uneducated persons, happens because they
are not conscious of those faculties, or of their right laws, but
use them blindly and capriciously, by fits and starts, talking sense
on one point and nonsense on another?"
"Too true, Heaven knows."
"But the educated man, if education mean anything, is the man who
has become conscious of those common human faculties and their laws,
and has learnt to use them continuously and accurately, on all
matters alike."
"True, O Socraticule!"
"Then is it not his especial business to teach the right use of them
to the less educated?-unless you agree with the old Sophists, that
the purpose of education is to enable us to deceive or coerce the
uneducated for our own aggrandisement."
"I am therefore, it seems, to get up Platonic Dialectics simply in
order to teach my ploughmen to use their common sense?"
"Exactly so. Teach yourself first, and every one around you
afterwards, not the doctrines, nor the formulas-though he had none-
but the habit of mind which Socrates tried in vain to teach the
Athenian youth. Teach them to face all questions patiently and
fearlessly: to begin always by asking every word, great or small,
from 'Predestination' to 'Protection,' what it really means. Teach
them that 'By your words you shall be justified, and by your words
you shall be condemned,' is no barren pulpit-test, but a tremendous
practical law for every day, and for every matter. Teach them to be
sure that man can find out truth, because God his Father and
Archetype will show it to those who hunger after it. Try to make
them see clearly the Divine truths which are implied, not only in
their creeds, but in their simplest household words; and-"
"And fail as Socrates failed, or rather worse; for he did teach
himself: but I shall not even do that."
"Do not despair in haste. In the first place, I deny that Socrates
taught himself, for I believe that One taught him, who has promised
to teach every man who desires wisdom; and in the next place, I have
no fear but that the sound practical intellect which that same One
has bestowed on the Englishman, will give you a far better auditory
in any harvest field, than Socrates could find among the mercurial
Athenians of a fallen age."
"Well, that is, at all events, a comfort for poor me. I will really
take to my Plato again, till the hunting begins."
"And even then, you know, you don't keep two packs; so you will have
three days out of the six wherein to study him."
"Four, you mean-for I have long given up reading Sunday books on
Sunday."
"Then you read your Bible and Prayer-book; or even borrow some of
Lady Jane's devotional treatises; and try, after you have translated
the latter into plain English, to make out what they one and all
really do mean, by the light which old Socrates has given you during
the week. You will find them wiser than you fancy, and simpler
also."
"So be it, my dear Soul-doctor. Here come Lewis and the luncheon."
And so ended our conversation.