FullReads

“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.”