“I agree with you, and that was one of the reasons that made me decide to attack it. It is typical.”
“And, therefore, to anyone who is, though only as an amateur, an observer of things contemporary, it is interesting. Its very deficiencies will be instructive. Well, what I want you to do, Doctor, if you will be so good, is to help me with your superior knowledge of the things treated of to arrive at the spiritual condition of the treater. Perhaps you will not find the attempt too uninteresting, or....” He paused with a movement of courtesy.
Maddock, who had a faint suspicion that Gildea was mocking, half grumbled out humorously:
“Go on, then! Qualify yourself as a psychologist, my dear fellow, and then we will have a plunge into social metaphysics. It is refreshing in a country where they are all partizans, and Matthew Arnold and the purely intellectual life are not appreciated. Sic itur ad astra. In the name of all the lucidities, forward!”
“In the first place, then, we have to notice, have we not, that the little book is polemical, which, at any rate to the amateur observer of things contemporary, detracts somewhat from its historical value; for, after all, is not a polemist, to a large extent a man who defends the delusions of his friends against the delusions of his enemies, and leaves Truth, like the proverbial pounds, to look after herself? But, if we always remember to take off a percentage for the polemics, we need not miss what it is that the polemist really means and feels?”
“Πως γαρ οὐ?” said Maddock.
“And the more easily, as our Parker is in earnest about, what he calls, ‘his most serious and difficult task.’”
“Forensic flourishes!”
“—In earnest as far as suits the disposition of a theistic polemist.”