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“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?”