, 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-pr