giving that collusion is going on—that the jury is packed—that the dice are loaded. Even those who detect no palpable flaw in the dialectics employed, have a notion that better trained dialecticians can and will. Had Crito been, or engaged, his own reporter of the Socratic debates, they might have read very differently; and should Squire Templeton publish his version of the Windrush talkee, scepticiam may look up a little higher in the market. It is astonishing how little a Romanising curate has to say for himself in a Low Church novel, and how poor a figure the Clapham devotee cuts in a High Church one—how easily this disputant annihilates heterodoxy, and how summarily that one deprives orthodoxy of a foot (unless cloven) to stand on; so that, in the eleverest books of this type—the "Eclipse of Faith," for instance—the conclusion is one wherein nothing is concluded, so far as the purpose of the controversy is practical and proselytising.
Professor Windrush has had introductions, it seems, to Mr. Templeton from some Manchester friends of his: Manchester being, by Mr. Kingsley's account, a place where all such prophets are welcomed with open arms, their only credentials being that, whatsoever they believe, they shall not believe the Bible. This professor is characterised as a veteran whose fifty winters have left him a child, in all but the childlike heart which alone can enter the kingdom of heaven—audaciously contemptuous of all centuries but the nineteenth—propounding phrenology and mesmerism as the great organs of human regeneration—showing the most credulous craving after whatever is unaccredited or condemned by regularly educated men of science—careless about induction from the normal phenomena, and hankering after theories built upon exceptional ones—retailing second-hand German eclecticisms, now exploded in their native country—having no definite, formal, lucid notions on any topic whatsoever, but seemingly imbued with this one principle of faith, that it is the spiritual world which is governed by physical laws, and the physical by spiritual ones; that while men and women are merely the puppets of cerebrations and mentations, and attractions and repulsion, it is the trees, and stones, and gases, who have the wills and the energies, and the faiths, and the virtues, and the personalities. Templeton has been slightly infected—being predisposed thereto by sceptical tendencies—by the eloquence of his American guest. "I am disturbed and saddened," he confesses, over his morning's fishing, "by last night's talk;" and the said talkative evening has also affected "Parson Lot" sufficiently to send him to his desk instead of his bed, and impel him to draw up a "smashing" article against the professor, in the shape of Socrates redivivus.
This neo-Christian Socrates is commissioned to pull to pieces the tenet of Protagoras the sophist, that "truth is what each man troweth, or believeth to be true." And he sets to work with as much relish as Father Newman does with modern latitudinarianism. Poor Alcibiades has espoused the sophist's theory of the objective and the subjective, of truth absolute and individual opinion; and he is sadly mauled in the passage-at-arms. His assumption of the right of private judgment to publish abroad its creed or no-creed, is the object of assault; and the upshot of the argument, so cosily conducted to a triumph by Socrates, is, that if a man believes things derogatory to the character of the gods, not having seen them do wrong himself, and assured of his error by
