rd. He himself became an Amurath, a sultan
of thought, even before his apotheosis as the guide of that bewildered
clergyman, Mr. Robert Elsmere. At Oxford, when one went there, one found
Mr. Green already in the position of a leader of thought, and of young
men. He was a tutor of Balliol, and lectured on Aristotle, and of him
eager youth said, in the words of Omar Khayyam, "_He knows_! _he knows_!"
What was it that Mr. Green knew? Where was the secret? To a mind
already sceptical about masters, it seemed that the secret (apart from
the tutor's noble simplicity and rare elevation of character) was a knack
of translating St. John and Aristotle alike into a terminology which we
then believed to be Hegelian. Hegel we knew, not in the original German,
but in lectures and in translations. Reasoning from these inadequate
premises, it seemed to me that Hegel had invented evolution before Mr.
Darwin, that his system showed, so to speak, the spirit at work in
evolution, the something within the wheels. But this was only a personal
impression made on a mind which knew Darwin, and physical speculations in
general, merely in the vague popular way. Mr. Green's pupils could
generally write in his own language, more or less, and could "envisage"
things, as we said then, from his point of view. To do this was
believed, probably without cause, to be useful in examinations. For one,
I could never take it much more seriously, never believed that "the
Absolute," as the _Oxford Spectator_ said, had really been "got into a
corner." The Absolute has too often been apparently cornered, too often
has escaped from that situation. Somewhere in an old notebook I believe
I have a portrait in pencil of Mr. Green as he wrestled at lecture with
Aristotle, with the Notion, with his chair and table. Perhaps he was the
last of that remarkable series of men, who may have begun with Wycliffe,
among whom Newman's is a famous name, that were successively accepted at
Oxford as knowing something esoteric, as possessing a shrewd guess at the
secret.

"None the less
I still came out no wiser than I went."

All of these masters and teachers made their mark, probably won their
hold, in the first place, by dint of character, not of some peculiar
views of theology and philosophy. Doubtless it was the same with
Socrates, with Buddha. To be like them, not to believe with them, is the
thing needful. But the younger we are, the less, perhaps, w