ed millenniums. On the contrary, it is an ideal
interpretation of their own activity, a mirror focussing into feature
and form the very same fact which they saw distorted and blurred in
the troubled stream of time. The Good, in the Greek world, was simply
the essence and soul of the Real; and the Socrates of Xenophon who
frankly identified justice with the laws, was only expressing, and
hardly with exaggeration, the current convictions of his countrymen.
That, to my mind, is the attitude of health; and it is the one natural
to the plain man in every well-organized society. Good is best known
when it is not investigated; and people like ourselves would do no
useful service if we were to induce in others the habit of discussion
which education has made a second nature to ourselves."

"My dear Parry!" cried Ellis, "you alarm me! Is it possible that we
are all anarchists in disguise?"

"Parry," I observed, "seems to agree with the view attributed by
Browning to Paracelsus, that thought is disease, and natural health is
ignorance."

"Well," rejoined Ellis, "there is a good deal to be said for that."

"There's a good deal to be said for everything," I rejoined. "But
if thought indeed be disease, we must recognise the fact that we are
suffering from it; and so, I fear, is the whole modern world. It was
easy for the Greeks to be 'healthy'; practically they had no past. But
for us the past overweights the present; we cannot, if we would,
get rid of the burden of it. All that was once absolute has become
relative, including our own conceptions and ideals; and as we look
back down the ages and see civilization after civilization come into
being, flourish and decay, it is impossible for us to believe that
the society in which we happen to be born is more ultimate than any
of these, or that its ideal, as reflected in its institutions, has
any more claim than theirs to be regarded as a final and absolute
expression of Good."

"Well," said Parry, "let us admit, if you like, that ideals evolve,
but, in any case, the ideal of our own time has more validity for
us than any other. As to those of the past, they were, no doubt,
important in their day, but they have no importance for the modern
world. The very fact that they are past is proof that they are also
superseded."

"What!" cried Leslie, indignantly, "do you mean to say that everything
that is later in time is also better? That we are better artists than
the Greeks? better c