break it and talk nonsense. And moreover, you ought not to ignore
it. For it seems to me, that you were sent to Cambridge by One
greater than, your parents, in order that you might learn it, and
bring it home hither for the use of the M. Jourdains round you here,
who have no doubt been talking prose all their life, but may have
been also talking it very badly."

"You speak riddles."

"My dear fellow, may not a man employ Reason, or any other common
human faculty, all his life, and yet employ them very clumsily and
defectively?"

"I should say so, from the gross amount of human unwisdom."

"And that, in the case of uneducated persons, happens because they
are not conscious of those faculties, or of their right laws, but
use them blindly and capriciously, by fits and starts, talking sense
on one point and nonsense on another?"

"Too true, Heaven knows."

"But the educated man, if education mean anything, is the man who
has become conscious of those common human faculties and their laws,
and has learnt to use them continuously and accurately, on all
matters alike."

"True, O Socraticule!"

"Then is it not his especial business to teach the right use of them
to the less educated?-unless you agree with the old Sophists, that
the purpose of education is to enable us to deceive or coerce the
uneducated for our own aggrandisement."

"I am therefore, it seems, to get up Platonic Dialectics simply in
order to teach my ploughmen to use their common sense?"

"Exactly so. Teach yourself first, and every one around you
afterwards, not the doctrines, nor the formulas-though he had none-
but the habit of mind which Socrates tried in vain to teach the
Athenian youth. Teach them to face all questions patiently and
fearlessly: to begin always by asking every word, great or small,
from 'Predestination' to 'Protection,' what it really means. Teach
them that 'By your words you shall be justified, and by your words
you shall be condemned,' is no barren pulpit-test, but a tremendous
practical law for every day, and for every matter. Teach them to be
sure that man can find out truth, because God his Father and
Archetype will show it to those who hunger after it. Try to make
them see clearly the Divine truths which are implied, not only in
their creeds, but in their simplest household words; and-"

"And fail as Socrates failed, or rather worse; for he did teach
himself: but I shall not even do that."

"Do not despair in