“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-probabilities argument—rather too narrow a basis for a World-faith to stand upon. Try all ‘mythic’ theories, Straussite and others, by honest Dialectics. Try your own thoughts and experiences, and the accredited thoughts and experiences of wise men, by the same method. Mesmerism and ‘The Development of Species’ may wait till they have settled themselves somewhat more into sciences; at present it does not much matter what agrees or disagrees with them. But using this weapon fearlessly and honestly, you will, unless Socrates and Plato were fools, arrive at absolute eternal truths, which are equally true for all men, good or bad, conscious or unconscious; and I tell you—of course you need not believe me till you have made trial—that those truths will coincide with the plain honest meaning of the Catholic Creeds, as determined by the same method—the only one, indeed, by which they or anything else can be determined.”
“You forget Baconian induction, of which you are so fond.”
“And pray what are Dialectics, but strict Baconian induction applied to words, as the phenomena of mind, instead of to things, the phenomena of—”
“What?”
“I can’t tell you; or, rather, I will not. I have my own opinion about what those trees and stones are; but it will require a few years’ more verification before I tell.”
“Really, you and your Dialectics seem in a hopeful and valiant state of mind.”
“Why not? Can truth do anything but conquer?”
“Of course—assuming, as every one does, that the truth is with you.”