"I do not doubt it. An earnest cultivated man, speaking his whole mind to an earnest cultivated man, will hardly fail of telling him something he did not know before. But if you had not been a cultivated man, Templeton, a man with few sorrows, and few trials, and few unsatisfied desires-if you had been the village shopkeeper, with his bad debts, and his temptations to make those who can pay for those who cannot,-if you had been one of your own labourers, environed with the struggle for daily bread, and the alehouse, and hungry children, and a sick wife, and a dull taste, and a duller head-in short, if you had been a man such as nine out of ten are- what would his school have taught you then? You want some truths which are common to men as men, which will help and teach them, let their temperament or their circumstances be what they will-do you not? If you do not, your complaint of Lady Jane's exclusive Creed is a mere selfish competition on your part, between a Creed which will fit her peculiarities, and a Creed which will fit your peculiarities. Do you not see that?" "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."